The poems in Joseph Stroud’s sixth book,
Everything That Rises
, explore living in a mortal world, the passage of time, aging, the experience of loss, the power of memory, and the redemptive possibilities of poetry. The book is sequenced into six sections, each distinctive in theme and style. It includes a variety of forms, from six-line lyrics, prose poems, slender vertical poems, odes, homages, reveries, and longer narrative, ruminative works. One section presents translations from Virgil, Catullus, Tu Fu, Pablo Neruda, and poems from the ancient Sanskrit and Tamil. Wide-ranging in subject, setting, and literary and cultural allusion, Stroud’s poems move quietly, reverently across the earth and through time with a keen observation and wonder at the world’s luminous presence.