Jill Peláez Baumgaertner's Christmas list

To give

I will be giving Brian Doyle’s A Shimmer of Some­thing: Lean Stories of Spiritual Substance to several friends. Doyle, editor of Portland Magazine and author of many books, is also a poet popular with Century readers. His “box poems” are rectangular prose poems on subjects as varied as “Mrs. Job,” “What a Father Thinks While Driving His Daughter, Age Seventeen, to Rehab,” and “Choosing a Baseball Bat.” Doyle is a storyteller who points out the mystery of what appears to be the ordinary.

I’ll also be giving Cave Art, the first book by a retired Chicago attorney, Charles Hughes. His poems are clear and vibrant jewels. Subject matter in­cludes Hughes’s memory of a professor reading John Donne’s “Valediction Forbidding Mourn­ing” to college freshmen, the joys of fishing, and an elderly man keeping vigil over his dying wife. All of these poems breathe empathy and love, more so than any collection I’ve read in recent years.