Poetry is a craft as well as an art. It's a resource for surviving, as well as an ornament for the good life. I've carried poetry along with me since I was 16 years old and now I'm 66. It's served me well. Anyone selling a product, ought to provide samples. Here are some from this book: The Three-Legged Race: Marriage is a shared dream/ a blank canvas of the will, wherein, / two painters make one painting/ if they can. Louisiana Ballad: Louisiana trees are kindly and brave/ Straining toward heaven from roots in the grave/ Shading their neighbors with the leaves they make. Ballroom Dancing: Dance is the body borne by love/ to pivot on invisible wings/ & draw in space & color a/ beguiling image on god's face. The Talking Cure: Bashfulness is to pillow talk/ what lace and crystal tableware is to food/ a nuisance to the bawdy appetite. Affirming Life in Central Park: Today, I learned again/ that life's the hammock where I sway and rest/ and I'm life's infinitely favorite part/ the cradle where the world-baby/ gets to appraise itself. Hippy Elegy: Beautiful losers, delicate souls/ harmless young freaks with solo guitars/ strange modern ancient troubadours. I've never had a poem published before, but I have been an English teacher and a newspaper reporter. There's 18,000 words in this book, divided into 47 poems. It is indeed, my life's work. My poems try to use every emotion available to make the point that we should go on, that we can go one, and even, that it's fun to go on. I guess whimsy and irony occur as frequently as anything else in my work. When I was a kid the word "tragi-comic" was a popular word in the Arts. I still like that word. There's absolute rhyme schemes in some of my poetry, and absolutely free verse in others. I have one poem that's full of righteous indignation over social inequities, and another one that worships 'blesséd' air-conditioning. Of course there's too many love poems, but after all, what are poets for? I've arranged the poems by subject: marriage, family, science, loneliness, politics, etc., 15 subjects in all. I did that so browsing readers, with too many things on their minds, have the best chance of finding poems that suit their immediate feelings. I believe that good poetry should, usually, be easy to understand. I like to think that poetry is the "Queen of the Sciences" - more successful than other disciplines in helping humanity chase the tail of its own (mis)understandings.