The Joy of Their Holiness

Before calling Peggy Turnbull’s poems “poignant,” I looked the word up to find it might suggest sadness and even some regret. Yet it also connotes a sharpness or pungency. There is some sadness here, yes, yet the poems are also pungent like a sharp Wisconsin cheddar. Turnbull always acknowledges “the goddess / of sweet small things” and celebrates “the blessings in my tiny, mortal life.” Hers is “a world suffused with awe.” She allows the small things she encounters to speak for themselves and brings us to their greater wonder. This is a remarkable collection.   Tom Montag, Poet, essayist, and blogger. Author of Seventy at Seventy, The Big Book of Ben Zen, In This Place: Selected Poems 1982-2013; co-editor (with David Graham) of Local News: Poetry About Small Towns.