Violence and the Secular

Doug Canfield's poems are the careful expressions of a man who has seen deeply into the world and who has understood what he has seen. I suppose this is the essential definition of the poet, and Doug Canfield was definitively a poet. He has given us the great gift of his vision and his humanity. His poems are a pleasure, a revelation, and an honor to read. Scott Momaday, novelist and poet, Pulitzer Prize winner for House Made Of Dawn. In Violence and the Secular Douglas Canfield flays the reader with the violence endemic to our culture and within himself; but as he was dying, he wrote unforgettable lyrics to his family and to life. This collection embodies the complexity of the flawed but remarkable man he was - scholar, teacher, husband, father, poet. Richard Shelton, poet, author of The Tattooed Desert, The Bus to Veracruz and Going Back to Bisbee. Douglas Canfield surveys in unvarnished but poignant style the violence that seems endemic to humankind, reaching from his own experience into well-known violent acts of the contemporary world, and on to those of history and mythology. At times, with great effect, he calls in phrases from other poets past and present to strengthen his own powerful arguments. From poem to poem the poetry flows in a rich and swelling current, in free verse or sometimes in iambic form that does not emerge as iambic until examined - which is to say as the finest kind of iambic rhythm. L. D. Clark, novelist, author of A Bright Tragic Thing, The Plains and other novels.