I have problems with feeling guilty about ridiculous things. Last week, I was incredibly blessed to receive a promotional copy of The Green Bible.

This new edition of the Bible (from a Harper Collins imprint, interestingly) is so beautiful I feel guilty that I’m going to keep it and use it as my new Bible. But not too guilty, you understand.

It doesn’t make sense that I would feel guilty about such a gift, but I guess I just don’t feel like I deserve it. But don’t worry. Like I said. I’ve decided to keep it and love it for myself. Call me selfish. Call me crazy. This is not one that I’m going to give away. It’s only $20.00 on Amazon anyway.

Besides just being an interesting concept, the book is very satisfying to hold. The linen cover feels good. The book has good weight. It opens easily and rests open. The pages are thin but substantive. And the ink is easy on the eyes.

You’ll get a sense of the concept by watching their promotional video. For example, they say the Bible has over 1000 references to the Earth. That’s more than the number of references to heaven. More than the number of references to love. Watch the video and tell me what you think.

That’s the joke in my house anyway. Other guys grab a beer, sit on the couch, flip on the TV and respond to every question with grunts:

“Uhhnnnhhh Uhhnnnhhh.”

I grab a beer, sit on the couch, flip open a book of poetry and respond with grunts:

“Uhhnnnhhh Uhhnnnhhh.”

The stack of books on my nightstand is getting rather large, but I got my friend John Poch’s new book the other day. It won a big national prize. So of course, I dropped everything to read it–and grunt at my family. (The truth is I read at night in a cave of covers with a book light while my wife sleeps. Like a kid in middle school or something.)

John’s book Two Men Fighting with a Knife is my kind of poetry. (Here’s the book direct from the publisher.) Like all books of poetry, I only marked half of the poems on the first read. Some I marked “FUN!” Others “sad…” One “wow.” And lots of underlined phrases like this one about the speaker’s father:

A god some nights, he carried me up our stairs,
my feet bumping the wallpapered halls, my prayers
let slide for murmurs. He laid the angel’s shields
over me and let them glisten as I slept.
He woke me for chores, for school. Later, he left.

It kind of chokes me up to read it, you know? That’s from “The Angel on the Lamp.” There’s also an astounding sonnet crown dedicated to his surgeon. My favorite poem in the book, though, is a fun sonnet about swatting mosquitoes while on vacation in Mexico (among other things).

Lots of sonnets in the book. John specializes in structured verse, particular forms with rigid rules of rhyme and meter and argument. You can see hints of that in the excerpt above “stairs/prayers,” “slept/left.”

I know the book is good because as soon as I finished I wrote a poem. Good poetry has that effect on me. It’s beautiful and finely crafted, but also inspiring and empowering. In short, John Poch is a master of sprezzatura. So here’s the poem I wrote (which you can hear me read in a new podcast episode):

Shutting Down
for John Poch

I hear a cricket in my room, chirping
in time to the flashing cable modem light.
My ears fight the sound, the constant insect flirting
with my mind to take flight together tonight.
Not quite in my room, though, I think it’s outside
our window back on the porch–behind the grill
or underneath or even, God forbid, inside
on the cold, dirty rack where meat and rust still
decay. Like the day in my mind disintegrates
into static from scratching legs or electronic
squeaks from data packages arriving too late.
The monitor’s glow motivates me with chronic
cricket cries to mouse clicks. Shut down. Window’s
symphonic sigh brings silence I suppose.

Yesterday, I wrote my thoughts on The Return‘s front cover, back cover, endorsements, and stuff.

Today, I’d like to do a quick community review of page one.  As Camy Tang said recently, most readers give a book a page or two to hook the reader. She figures that’s about 20 seconds.

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To be fair, I should judge The Return by a little more than its cover, right? But we do need to start at the beginning with…

1) The cover

As a science fiction fan, this cover gets my attention. I recognize that photo from NASA’s archives. Looks like a genuine Rover shot, but I’m not really sure.

My feeling that The Return could actually be good, sound, technical science fiction is reinforced by the blurb on …

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