Calling the Garden from the Grave

Lesley Clinton's Calling the Garden from the Grave explores our restless human yearnings and spiritual endurance. Pieces in this collection have won awards from the Poetry Society of Texas, Press Women of Texas, and the Houston Poetry Fest. Settings as vast as the West Texas desert and intimate as a one-bedroom apartment invite the reader to both adventure and contemplation.

In these pages, the reader meets trailblazers and homebodies, mothers and daughters, lovers and loners, the famed and the obscure. Each wrestles in some way with a God-given calling. Each struggles to bloom in soil made dry by quotidian loss or past transgressions.

Clinton offers a sacramental view of the world informed by her Catholic faith. No small grace goes unseen in these poems; each tiny sacrifice and moment of growth is honored. This collection brings God's numinous, intangible space of fortitude and renewal into the abundant, greening poetry garden.