Winged Spirits: Collage Paintings by Jean Zaleski; 24 Contemporary American Poets

In the Introduction to this beautiful collection of poems, first published in 1995, Franklin Reeve writes:

     "In the great democratization of our world over the last two-hundred years, angels have become much less formal (as portrayed in Shakespeare's plays, for instance) and more like us - or more as we'd like to be. We no longer think them capable of "falling," like Lucifer, and we don't picture them as the avenging archangelic raptors of a generation ago. They're Raphael's putti. They'e Rosso Fiorentino's parrot-winged child. They're the substance of fairy tales. One calendar even calls an angel "a metaphysical Lone Ranger."

     "What more definitive may we say they are? They're samples of our minds. They're mini-pictures of our realities. They're images of ourselves transformed by the music of colors and words. They'e pieces of what we've lost and what we hope to become. I the world of now, between then and then, we be the dreamers: they're the dreams that float on and on and on, from one generation to the next."

This is truly a collection to be treasured.