Affection and gratitude are much of what readers feel while engaging with Michael Cervas's new collection, Even Here. Each poem--and the entire collection--is a rigorous act of examining a life that has been both singular and ordinary. Honesty, intelligence, plain-spoken brilliance, and a generous heart have been harnessed to poems we readers will wish to read again and again.

In his fourth collection, Even Here, Michael Cervas claims not to be a man of faith, and yet in these poems he worships the words, visions and desires that have become this poet's altar, a place where metaphor might rip "new meanings from old cloth." In poems that are clear, accessible and specific, he leads us on a journey from the weave of childhood memories to the fullness of adulthood. When we read these poems, we walk with him along the way, discovering poems about listening and seeing, about the words and melodies that created a life. They are also about the inevitability of loss, about a time when we may no longer see "droplets speckling the glass, the trees with leaves already melting auburn and orange." Most of all, these gentle poems speak about how the memories of our lives linger, how words and visions from the past accompany us as we move through our days. These poems are lights to guide us.