Marked by a delightful radiance and beauty of form, the finely crafted poems gathered here will regale you with rich tapestries of love, history, and the natural world.

Here, too, are colorful, exquisitely sculpted stories—comic, tragic, zany, lyrical, and even macabre—that feature larger-than-life characters in a cavalcade of quirky incidents sure to bring you unstinting delight.

Gilgamesh walks here. Vesuvius erupts. Galileo confesses and Quixote remembers. Barbarians invade, lovers yearn, infants slumber, death approaches, and widowers grieve. Dancers twirl, wolves howl, and between times joyful bedlam often prevails.

Permeating all, however, is an intense love of life revealed through an affectionate (and sometimes jarring) sweep of times and circumstances—from crowded buses in midtown Manhattan to mythic gods by Egypt’s Nile, from gaudy sands in moneyed Palm Beach to raging fires devouring Pompeii.

Rejecting the often anemic, myopic spirit of so much literature today, these energetic tales and lovely poems combine vast erudition with Robert Frost–like simplicity, ensuring that, regardless of your background or training, you’ll find in this sumptuous literary banquet many things to make your own spirit soar, today, tomorrow, and forever!