One hallmark of a serious religious sensibility is its relationship with the profane world. The challenge for a poet is to make both aspects truly convincing. The poet aims for poems where spirit acknowledges the ripe miseries of the gambling flesh and the flesh sings of spirit's exacting grace. William Byers is such a poet. He knows the world with the eyes of the military man who has stared at nuclear apocalypse and crusted vomit on a bar top and he knows the world with the hungry soul of one who has craved a greater love. His poems are deeply moving as they unsparingly show how we fall and how we sometimes rise, how we stutter and how we find the words that are astonishingly apt. This book is full of many such words in many careful forms. William Byers is a very accomplished American poet. Baron Wormser