Dust and Prayers

"Bartow's poems serve their purposes with dignity and grace. Appropriating and adapting traditional forms, he has commemorated not only the large events that give shape to specific lives--birth, death, marriage--but also the small moments in which grace becomes visible in a squirrel, a shaft of light on a forest path, an awakened memory of an old teacher. We hear in these poems echoes of Herbert, Emerson, and Frost, and of the biblical stories and scenes that deeply inform the poet's sensibility and frame his understanding of 'ordinary' life, which insists, like Hopkins, that nothing is really ordinary, because 'it is all a purchase, all a prize.'"

--Marilyn Chandler McEntyre, author of Christ, My Companion: Meditations on the Prayer of St. Patrick



"Stop, keep still, and listen to the soul stirring poems in this collection. Charles Bartow lays these pieces before us like steppingstones across his passion for God, God's gospel, and God's Creation. His work is honest, heart-felt, and inspiring. Take them up, give them voice, and watch them dance in the Spirit!"

--Richard F. Ward, author of Speaking of the Holy: The Art of Communication in Preaching