Amazon Category:  Poetry Publisher: Finishing Line Press, P.O.Box 1626, Georgetown, KY 40324 ISBN-10:  1622292405 Pages: 29 ISBN-13: 9781622292400 Price: $12.00 (eBook) an exploration of finality, and its sister, mystery Excerpt Good Friday Rain On your death day the Bay window drips. Mordant rain. The weeping of the sky Fallen Down the stairs, Coughing and belching and Flashing her flame. "Why did you have to die that way?" She cries As she remembers how You washed our feet. So she washes now clean our alibis. Tribute.

Ever
In Robert Phelps' title, Ever does not come after "for" or before "lasting." Father Bob (as I know him)confronts the unframed fact of death, which is one of its unacknowledged mysteries: "My father," he writes to his flesh-and-blood parent, "I sing of the wondrous paradox; and/deny, as I have been taught, the /inevitability of your bony shoulders." Phelps faces mortality without the "press of our weariness" that can "cataract the picture," without fear's "stain." This is a brave book whose consolations come only after confrontation, courage. "Death now gestates imagination," Phelps writes, and through his we see that, just as it is in our nature to die, "it is in the nature of trees to be green."

Susan M. Schultz