The poems in this collection arise from the vivid awareness that we are immersed in mystery. Dwelling in the shadow of Gabriel’s wing, we are called to embrace the plenitude of miracle and melancholy that weave our lives. The cover painting of Caspar David Friedrich intimates this spirit: two gazes—a man’s and a woman’s—contemplate and converge in a vision beyond themselves. A vast sky canopies a somber forest: at the penumbral verge of luminous and tenebrous realms, their surrender embodies the harmony of opposites—the present moment permeated by eternal presence, coalescence of the spiritual and sensual, the personal and universal, nature and culture, transcendence and immanence, the “communion between the finite and the infinite” (Novalis). 'By many aspects, Michael Bradburn-Ruster, a mature man and poet, is ‘The Wanderer above the Sea of Fog’ (1817), as depicted in another of Caspar David Friedrich’s paintings. In our terrible days of Covid-19 pandemic, Michael Bradburn-Ruster examplifies ‘The Function of the Poet’, as defined by French poet Victor Hugo in 1830 : ‘In such times gone awry / The poet brings tidings of better days.’ Alain Saint-Saëns, French poet.