Many Parishes

Koesters' Many Parishes is an original. The poems seem to smack the hard-ass contemporary world up against a deep spiritual sense, until we see they're one and the same. Adrian Koesters is able to write of men calling out to a ten-year old ''spinster'' to ''come on down, sweetheart, I got something over here to show you,'' and allow us to feel in her small, frightened heart the identical anguish of soul as in the nun who's ''divided from the principalities and goes in terror of them.'' These poems, like the nuns, ''take things personally.'' They're lyrical confessions of the deepest griefs--abuse, divorce, doubt, and loneliness. They provide absolution, and positively joy, in their skillful and lucid singing. --Fleda Brown, author of No Need of Sympathy