DHARMA RAIN

Praise for DHARMA RAIN "Watch your step," warns the speaker in "Vortices," one of the gripping poems in Terry Lucas's Dharma Rain. Good advice for approaching Lucas's second full-length collection, for in these poems, "everything enters you." From the grim realities of "The Arrival," "Horse Latitudes," and "A Short History of Baby Incubators" to the wry humor of "Science Fact or Fiction" (about the history of "Giving the finger") and the delicious wit of "Psalm '66" to an amazing series of poems placing John Calvin as a kid growing up in Texas in the '50s, the poems of Lucas's new book confront the mysteries of science, faith, and desire in exquisite forms, delicious language, and keen intelligence. - Wendy Barker In these ambitious, far-reaching poems, Terry Lucas alternates between his own spiritual agon, specifically his wrestling with Calvinistic ghosts in the persona of a boy named Calvin, and his eclectic, lyrical investigations of such subjects as wild dogs, the spirit, Tassajara, the New Mexico desert, becoming a poet, survivors of barrel descents over Niagara Falls, and a short history of baby incubators. In his fresh new visions of the world stripped of its former fashions, ideologies, and mythologies, Lucas writes as if he's observing the world for the first time on his own heuristic terms in both dexterously formal and free verse. The result is a bold, often iconoclastic chronicle of a poet who "one day...just left / the stains in the whorls of his fingertips, the taste / on his tongue, and went home forever / to the work that had called him from birth." - Chard deNiord