Detail from the Garden of Earthly Delights

In the title poem, ""Detail from The Garden of Earthly Delights,"" Dennis Hinrichsen writes a line about his failing grandfather that could encompass the entire book: ""But then the mystery takes over."" Ranging from backyard trees to the Shroud of Turin, from a John Wayne movie to the passionate poetry of Catullus, Hinrichsen explores the pulse and counterpulse that pull us simultaneously towards life and death, often leaving us stranded in the zone between them, where the erotic and the spiritual, the exstravagant and the mundane, inform our daily lives. If any solace is to be found there, these poems suggest that it will come through acceptance and celebration of all the uneasy but natural juxtapositions that constitute the world we know--- The ""Skewed anointings"" by which the earth is strangely stained and blessed.