Blessing the House

In his fourth book of poems, Jim Daniels visits the sites of domestic faith - Catholic schools, sex and marriage, childbirth - in an attempt to witness a world worth believing in. A sense of search unites these poems, whether they take place on the cement slabs of a 1950s Detroit suburb or on the hillside cemetary of an Italian village. In their search for hope, grace, and decency in the small dramas of an individual life, the poems of Blessing the House become larger, more overtly political. They are, as Daniels writes, "prayers for this world, with their clear consequence."