This is a relatively recent (2020) hardback from the Salesian Missions collection of poems which I just bought in (May 2025, so just three months ago). Since I’ve gotten through my stack of Poetry magazines (and, finally, the complete works of Keats), I brought it up into the bedroom for the poetry nightcap.
And, gentle reader, you know I like Ideals magazine, and that’s what you’re getting in a collection like this. Poetry about seasons and about the relationship with God–moreso in this collection, as it’s produced by a Catholic organization as a fundraiser–but I get that in the grandma poetry chapbooks I also accumulate. These collections and Ideals are generally a cut above the self-published chapbooks (my own included?). It seems we get some overlap between the two, poets whose work appears in both (Grace E. Easley? Steven Michael Schumacher?)–but maybe I just read enough of these little collections that the names are just familiar only from Salesian publications.
So I enjoyed it as a light bit of a snack before bed, a ritual that winds me down for sleep.
The back flap had a long list of 128-page collections like this and regularly published pocket-sized books which I thought might be a checklist I could use to see how well my collection is going. But it might not be a comprehensive list–books I have reported on from the 20th century do not appear to be represented. Is it possible that they’ve published so many this century that they didn’t even have room for decades’ worth from last century? I guess someone knows, but not me.
At any rate, I recommend them. Perhaps I should send them some money as well to get the freshest works. It’s odd; subscribing to First Things and The New Oxford Review and, briefly, Touchstone have gotten me onto a lot of Catholic mailing lists, but not Salesian Missions.
