Grace Street

"I live at a spirit address," Edward A. Dougherty assures himself in this suite of twelve meditations, Grace Street. He inhales the domestic, and his teaching life, and the nature of morning glories and turtles, and, it seems, the whole vast east of empty-mind Buddha-nothingness to keep arriving at that address despite a world that often seems a "valley of tears." Reading this fine collection, I found myself within a process of "slow revelation," felt myself in the presence of quiet power as he breathes words and comes to realize, again and again, that love (and such a complex love that it resists definition, as it should) must be "The scripture of each day / we author and read," or we are lost. Dougherty can help us author our days.
-William Heyen, author of CRAZY HORSE & THE CUSTERS

GRACE STREET gives us poems gleaned by close attention, anchored by earth, deepened by word, lifted by the slow dawning of spirit. I read them with gratitude, with relish, with respect.
-Margaret Gibson, author of BROKEN CUP

Edward Dougherty's poems fuse the philosopher and spiritual seer in him with the close observer of the natural world in its many facts, forces, weathers. Anchored in the actual, he can rise to rapture without sentimentality, and use with authority words like nobility, salvation, grace and mystery. Whether sensing how "The flames of grace flare up / beyond the personal," or noting "the silent angle of owl-flight between sassafras trunks," he will always persuade us of his vision's authenticity. Mixing earth-boundedness ("the tongue tasting the world's / shape and texture") with the simple conviction that "I live at a spirit address," Dougherty makes poems that can satisfy any reader's whole self.
-Eamon Grennan, author of THERE NOW: POEMS

Grace Street is home to "a householder who listens to crickets, to the moon's / high hum and its musical descent into dreams" ...a postal address for these poems of fine lyrical resonance.
-John Balaban, author of PATH, CROOKED PATH