For All We Know

This volume of poetry is the result of a lifetime of reading and writing. The first poem here is from 1970, and the last ones come from the start of 2026, a 56-year period that saw the world evolving and changing in astounding and unpredictable ways—with very few constants. But one of those constants has been the very human need for poetry, and the singular insights that only poetry can really deliver. In many ways poetry works against the modern mindset of fragmentary attention spans and doomscrolling. Instead of saying so much less with so much more, poetry seeks to say so very much more with considerably less, so that each poem here can be opened up like a Russian nesting doll, and shown to be working on multiple levels, just as the natural world and the seasons around us can seem utterly quotidian and commonplace—and yet we know what the ocean can be, and we always sense it when the spring rolls around and unpacks an entirely new raft of fresh ideas each May. Good poetry is accessible, and yet has depth and unknown dimensions that must be thought about to come to fruition. In place of a media firehose driven by grievance and algorithms, poetry can be a drop of dew upon a tulip that has just emerged. For All We Know is a book of considerable length but it always comes back to saying the same thing, to wit, that life is astounding and that how we think about it and talk about it and write about it is of vital importance. Words are magic, after all, and that may be why the construction of them is known as "spelling," right? The thoughts in these pages are unique and yet familiar, like an old cardigan you seek when the evening dews and damps portend. The intention of this poet is to join all of us, and have us join him, in the remarkable and tragic comedy that we seem to be enacting on a daily basis, and this includes trying to coax a lion out of a car, as well as grasping the cosmic implications of the dawn when the fairies and elves must needs decamp, and the "regular" world comes to think it holds sway—but the poet knows better. Poets help us remember how to be ourselves, and remind us of things we knew as well as pointing the way to a future that has light and love and stars and silence, grace and dignity and the fond affection we save for just a few folks, when indeed the poet keeps saying we should apply this universal solvent to everything we encounter. Even in an age when bright lights and shallow thoughts are the prevailing themes, poems such as these speak quietly of a world with mossy woodlands and peaceful rivers, as well as streets that include used bookstores, little parks, old schools and libraries, and the lost treasure to be found within.