Whether reflecting on our diminished sense of wonder for all life's most simple pleasures or shouting to the hilltops: "Let us be prodigal in praise, recklessly extravagant/ In sun and shadow celebration" in this collection of poems by J.R. Phillips we are given multiple samplings of the joys and exultations gleaned from a sensitive mind and eyes opened to the physical majesty of nature. There is an obvious adherence to the traditional precepts of Classical Romanticism, a fondness for meter and, always, a devotion to the musicality of language. Witness this short simple description of a poet's reaction to August Wilhelm's 1871 arrange- ment of the second movement of Bach's Suite No. 3 in D Major popularly referred to as Air on the G String The heavens come down from the sky. And circle the room in an auditory air. You listen. You stare. Your senses are lit By a burning fire in your ears. Wings lift you from your chair. Trees bend. Music flows and flowers. You ascend. From the Hollywood Hills where "one can almost imagine Oberon & Olivier/making their way to the up most peak" or along the Cotswold's of England not far from where his "father first drew breath" to the Castle St. Angelo in Rome, Italy where "The air is heavy with the sights and sounds/ of wings, crazy with tourists, dizzy with swallows" we retrace the thoughts and observations of a poet who views himself in many ways as a word painter with all the sights and sounds of the world around him as his canvas