Wow, what an awesome book. At first I thought it would be just another Coral ID book, but it is A LOT MORE! It's an easy reading text, while providing some good in depth technical meat. The pictures are top notch, and He actually has corals in there that I feel are common or have seen for sale in stores, yet no other book I have ever seen covers them, until now. Eric's experience and knowlegdge is top notch. He provides some really good information based on radical new discoveries as well as more current accepted practices etc.

My advice: this is a must buy for any reef aquarist, both novice and expert. The information is modern and up-to-date. If you don't have time to read all the current information on reef aquariums and coral husbandry online on the Internet, you might want to get this book, as it will give you a nice summary of current information.

I cannot say enough positive things about this book. I have a significant collection of books on marine fish and reef aquariums,and this is easily one of the best I have. If you are planning to keep corals and are really serious, you should buy this book and follow Borneman's advice. The pictures are excellent, and the depth and intelligence of the coverage on everything from corallimorphs to stonies is exceptional.

This is one of the most informative publication on the coverage of corals for reef keeping in a single volume. The pictures may be a bit oversaturated but the information it contains is highly informative and is well researched.

In the tradition of Delbeek & Sprung 2 volume series and Fossa and Nilsens MCRA 4 volume series this stands in league with their books for its extensive coverage!

If you like coral reef tanks then this book is for you!!

A Protocol For Touch was awarded the Vassar Miller Prize in Poetry and secured Constance Merritt as a truly gifted poet with a recognition richly deserved. Exile: The air is dry in the much-promised land,/And mountains whisper "this is not your home":/Still nights entice me like a knowing hand,/And strangers' hands have sometimes brushed my own./Yet milk, so sweet, turns rancid in my mouth,/And I can name no answer to desire/Since God is everywhere and I'm without./I taste the stone's sleek kiss, lie with each hour/And the dream of taking up my staff and rod,/Or no longer lingering weary at the door/My hands heavy with holy tears for God/Or some woman who always fails to come./But it's hard to leave the vigil once begun,/And waiting soon becomes much more than for.

These poems reward the first reading with immediate joy, and reward each subsequent reading with continuing provocation and power. I love this book. I'm giving it to all my friends. Any woman (or any man, for that matter) who has wrestled with the troubling intersections of individual spirit and received authority will find in these poems a wealth of comfort and wisdom, as well as shocking realization!

A friend of mine bought me this book, knowing I'm interested inthe field, also knowing that I know nothing about Dental Assisting.It was easy enough for a beginner to learn the basics through the advanced. EXCELLENT.

I purchased this anthology in 1998, after reading some of the editor's poetry. I liked it enough to trusth his editing work. Just in terms of the senses, the book (hardcover) is like a delicious hymnal, a small sacred place of its own, with deep purple covers, lovely design details on the pages (yes, also subtle), and pleasing, legible font. (These are important to me in poetry anthologies. I like to enjoy the WHOLE experience of reading).

While I was already familiar with the work of Annie Dillard, Denise Levertov, Richard Wilbur, and Kathleen Norris, this lovely anthology--wonderful for savoring on beautiful afternoons with some tea and cookies while sitting in my garden--introduced me to some new favorites: Diane Glancy, with her Native American experiences woven powerfully into Christian imagery; Naomi Shihab Nye, David Hopes.

While I would have preferred more poetry and less prose, there are truly lyrical moments in the prose selections. Linda Hasselstrom's "Buffalo Winter" has this: "After a hot shower, I slept until nine, dreaming of buffalo bulls with gleaming horns and a glowing language that was not words; of lifting shovels filled with snow, and breathing deeply of moonlight as I drove dark highways. Always, something secret pursued me."

If you value a sense of place, of living creatures, of the natural world in your literature, try this graceful anthology. And if you can afford it, get the hardcover. It satisfies the eyes and hands the way the writing satisfies the mind and heart. *Mir*

As I began this volume, I prepared myself to be disappointed. The first section "Deep Below Our Violences" consists of poems that are well written with an interesting mix of topics and forms. However, they say little about the world and humanity that is not common poetic parlance. "Alexandrian Fragments" uses the burning of the library in Alexandria as its primary image; "Archaeology: A Subsequent Lecture" uses a dig; "Interval with Erato" a sensual/sexual encounter with the muse ...

The second section "The Recovered Midrashim of Rabbi Sab", in contrast, shows a very inventive poet writing distinctive, meaningful prose poems. "YHWH's Image" presents an image of Time which pauses, twitches its tail, opens it's eyes while God creates creates humanity in his own image, a precise image molded in clay on God's body. "The Turning of Lot's Wife" shows the wife as the compassionate one: "... she could not turn her back on even one doomed child of the city, but must turn her back instead upon the saved." "In the Well of Joseph's Brief Despair" presents the view of the world from the bottom of the well - and its continuing effect on Joseph after his life was spared.

The final section "Supplications" presents two strong themes - Hebrew vs. Greek thought patterns and the value of body. The topics supporting these themes include religious stylites (monks living on small, high platforms, the harrowing of hell, the death of the crucified man headed for paradise, Mary Magdalen ... in these poems the same formal strengths appear that appear in the first section. However, here Cairns more frequently has something uncommon to say.

I'm no convert, but I must say the charm and candor of these poems (not to mention the music and craft of the poems themselves) have me rethinking some of my knee-jerk dismissal of that old story. I'd heard he was a CHRISTIAN poet, but I didn't know he was also a POET. Amazing work.

Erotic, holy, erudite, and deeply moving! I love how Cairns engages both metaphysical mystery and sensual materiality in a single amazing moment, in a single turn of phrase--as in "Loves" when Magdalen observes "All loves are bodily, require that the lips part, and press their trace of secrecy upon the one beloved." I'd say the visionary has returned to American poetry.

Read this book and you will find it difficult to put down as I did. Two great looking teenagers with looks to die for and a mean streak they shared.......or did they? Karla Homolka says she was a battered wife???? ( oh really??) Paul Bernado great looking guy with an urge to humiliate, rape and dominate killed three innocent young teenagers in the most dreadful way - his girlfriened ( Karla) sat by and watched! He then raped her kid sister while she watched and she held her down while he raped her. She also happened to help drug the young sister. Karla then married her sisters killer a few weeks later. Bizarre! disgusting! unbelievable but very very addictive. There are 3 books on this famous case this is the first and one of the best but the story is gruesome and impossible to believe. If you like true crime this book is amazing many of my friends have read it and agree it is one of the most incredible cases of modern day murder. Read and be amazed! shocked or even disgusted but you will be unable to put the book down.

This book is so disturbing. It was so well written with such great detail and descriptions of each and every person involoved. You really get the feeling that you KNOW these people. I've read numerous true crime books over and over again....When I read this book, I literally had to stop reading true crime for a while. The things these two people, this couple, this husband and wife did to these women and Karlas very own sister is disgusting, disturbing and unbelievable. Paul was cruel to his wife but she is just as twisted as he. Remarkable book. A must read!

I first read Lethal Marriage and than chose to read this one 2nd because I still can't believe this happened and how really sick some of our society is and the irony is that we tend to stereo type people and if you looked at Paul and Karla who the hell could imagine they were as distorted as they were I think any true crime reader should buy all 3 books first reading Lethal Marriage because that book gives a more detail account into the sick horrendous actions of these two people than I would read Deadly innocence because that gives you insight of there character flaws and now i will be reading the 3rd book so i cant comment on that book yet....All I know is that after Lethal Marriage I did feel a bit sorry for Karla but after reading this book i do not anymore .... when i saw the pictures of both her eyes black and blue from Pauls beating I felt like she should have been hung...She could have stopped Paul by going to the police sooner than later rather than let her sister die ( and than marrys the lunatic) and these two girls and god knows who else we dont know about she only came forward when it suited her and not because she was doing any good deed she should have gotten the chair and so should Paul ...Its a great book but the story is so sick and so sad, so very,very sad.....

This collection includes selected poems from The Theology of Doubt (1985), The Translation of Babel (1990), Figures for the Ghost (1994) and Recovered Body (1998). The last, Recovered Body, is the only one of these that I have read. If the selection from it is representative, a significant portion of memorable poems has been excluded for this collection. The strongest poems in Recovered Body, "The Recovered Midrashim of Rabbi Sab" in included in part - this group of poems are insightful and unusual takes on scriptural stories.

From The Translation of Babel comes an excellent string of poems "The Translation of Raimundo Luz" which in a series of related poems ("My Infancy", "My Personal History", "My Language", "My Moral Dream", "My Imitation", "Our Lost Angels" ...) manages to explicate liberation theology in the best poetic, "post-modern" sense through the confounding of the life/personality of Raimundo Luz and Christ. From the same book comes a delightful homage to Calvino "Lost Cities: Calvino" and a wonderfully sassy "Lucifer's Epistle to the Fallen" with delightful lines: "Him! Showboat with the Heavy Thumbs! Pretender / at Creation! Maker of Possibilities!" combined with insightful images: "Imagine! The ignorance you're dressed in! / The way you wear it! ..."

In the new poems severals of the "Adventures in New Testament Greek" stand out as serious, playful analysis of key Biblical terms: Metanoia, Haireis, Nous, Mysterion ...

While the collection will appeal especially to those with an interest in religious poetry, this collection is solid poetry - worth consideration simply as excellent poetry.

The early poems are charming enough, but something absolutely uncanny happens as you chart the course from the second book (Translation of Babel) through the new poems section--an unusual (I'd say unique) poetic enterprise that opens up the possibility of the transcendent, but not a disembodied transcendent, rather a sense of the Holy made manifest in matter, matter that is lovingly attended.

W. B. Yeats once said: "Rhetoric is a quarrel with others; poetry is a quarrel with oneself." What's remarkable about these poems is the shapeliness of their arguments, their rhetorical constructions. In the new poems collected here, one can overhear Cairns' speaker quarreling with himself in the considered measures of accomodation and uneasy transcendence. These poems remind us that great poems are great arguments drawn forward by a literary troika of phanopoeia, logopoeia, and melopoeia--not simply the pyrotechnics of dazzling wordplay, as is often the case these days. Cairns has fallen in love with reality. As God--or the supposed person of God--says in his dialogues with the great mystic, St. Catherine of Siena: "If you have received my love sincerely without self-interest, you will drink your neighbor's love sincerely. It is just like a vessel that you fill at the fountain. If you take it out of the fountain to drink, the vessel is soon empty. But if you hold your vessel in the fountain while you drink, it will not get empty: indeed, it will always be full." An extraordinary charity suffuses and defines the character of this work throughout. Whether the speakers of these poems find their cups empty or full is not so much a question of fate but of the vessel's angle or attitude of repose. These poems possess a charm far beyond their ecclesiastical sway, and we are lucky to have them. If there were only one poet for whom I could be the evangelist, it would be Scott Cairns.