Zeal

The poems of Andrew Bailey's first collection honor the moments where the everyday face of the world slips for a second. Some recognize these glimmers where they intrude on a life; others approach them through dream, through myth, through faith or intoxication. Confident in inherited and free forms, contemporary and classical idioms, the voice presented in Zeal is by turns loving, elegiac, contemplative and tangential. With roots in the work of Redgrove, Raine, Hopkins, and Blake, Bailey's writing follows an unfashionable but fascinating path toward the more than quotidian.