“Danny Fitzpatrick practices a poetics of experiential immediacy. Sound and image converge, where ‘the knuckles of my left hand have / split, and dark seeds squeeze / from Greek crosses cracked / into my ring finger.’ The sensitive, sensual engagements with the physical and familial lead into meditative moments where Hector and Achilles feature, how, in ‘Odysseus and the Squid’: ‘The War rhythm / drifted through the dream light / as irons sank into the shadow / like the soul of a murdered man / bending to drink a black lamb’s blood.’ Fitzpatrick has constructed a guide for wanderers, for those who feel unmoored, a map of many voices, where Marsden Hartley’s The Ice-Hole brushes with Don Quixote, Salvador Dali, and Wangechi Mutu. Yonder in the Sun is a book of lived lives steeped in dailiness, the present, while simultaneously enveloping the past. It’s a book of deep engagements with art, with examining what it means to be an American and a human in our present moment.” —Charles Kell, senior editor of the Ocean State Review

“This collection is a beautifully haunting ensemble of poems that each in their own way, offer glimpses of the author and his immediate surrounds; and yet the work operates just as efficiently through elusive imagery, which allude to ideas and slip insights that encourage and tempt the reader to look deeper that mere surface meaning. There is a perfectly pitched tone and rhythm that is at home in the South, but the poems open up into a wider world both contemporary and classical almost in the manner of a gentler Poe. Fitzpatrick commands the attention of his reader through skill and control of the line, but just as importantly, he has a gift for figurative language that encourages and demands trust in his delicate blend of suspended reality and absolute place. —Clifton Redmond, Poet

Yonder in the Sun is a powerful collection that takes the reader on an evocative voyage of light and shadow, loss and surrender, hope and transfiguration. Daniel Fitzpatrick skillfully weaves his personal experiences within the aesthetics of art, literature, and Christianity. Titled after Shakespeare’s play Twelfth Night, Yonder in the Sunshines brightly amid well-crafted elegance and sensitivity to free, formal, and ekphrastic verse. Fitzpatrick’s word combinations sing as demonstrated in these lines, “sagging in her sofa’s gentle jaws, . . .” and “her eighty-year ears ripping rabbits/ from reality to thump the time, . . . “—Line after line Yonder in the Sun is an evocation of brilliance. Like Fitzpatrick’s poem Gabriel’s Oboe, this collection is poignant, higher-pitched, and penetrating, echoes the sounds of a double-reed woodwind instrument, where “The silken cups are shining in the knuckled twigs/ of dogwood.”  —Jeannie E. Roberts, author of The Ethereal Effect – A Collection of Villanelles and other books

“Daniel Fitzpatrick, who is a recent translator of Dante’s epic journey through Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso, now gives us his own journey of original poetry spanning a spectrum through the hell, purgatory and heaven of his life experiences, with subjects ranging from family…to loss… to literary fascinations. Daniel’s poem “Transfigured” is an exemplar of the chiaroscuro of this collection, from the rawness of “resurrected wounds” to the encounter with a “glint of mystery.”  —Annabelle Moseley, author of Awake with Christ, Sacred Braille: The Rosary as Masterpiece, and Our House of the Sacred Heart

“Behind the many opposites blended in these poems, a single spiritual landscape emerges – sunstruck but desolate, classically Mediterranean but also of the American south and the Caribbean, inhabited by the ghosts of past masters like Hart Crane and Wallace Stevens, vividly particularised like Elizabeth Bishop and touched by the traditionalism of Allen Tate. Daniel Fitzpatrick is the latest to have wandered in that hot, composite zone where childhood gives way to death and family is the only steadying influence. He has made his world here, taken his stand, and grounded himself in the language.” —Harry Clifton, Irish poet, author of “Secular Eden”, professor at University College Dublin

“This collection of Daniel Fitzpatrick’s elegant poetry is a deeply personal journey into his soul and memories, but it becomes much more than that when we also realize that much of what he writes applies to our own journeys in this life. The first poem in this book, “Magi,” is the perfect jumping off point for the entire collection when it becomes clear that the Wise Men’s search, guided by a star, can apply to us in our own journeys led by our own personal stars.” —Charles Gordon Rex, Jr., editor of It Is My Soul That Sings: Selected Poems of Charles Gordon Rex

“This is a book arrayed with poetic puzzles, full of aromatic words, giving off sounds and smells and inviting us to listen, to see, to scent our way through many and various moments, sketched, observed, like ‘where a snake scribbles its way’ (p. 17), suggesting a mixing, an unusual juxtaposition of words,  like ‘the liquid tick’ (p. 74), and a blending of memories, impressions of people and places, ancient echoes and holy thoughts slipping out and through the kaleidoscopic, surreal sense. Enjoy!” —Francis Etheredge, Catholic married layman, father of 11, 3 of whom are in heaven and an author, recently, of An Unlikely Gardener: Prose and Poems

“These are beautiful poems. Daniel Fitzpatrick has the ability to describe ordinary events in startling and moving ways. His poems dialogue with the classics, great art, and particularly the Bible, but always take us in unexpected directions. Yonder in the Sun has a philosopher’s heart, but with lines that will haunt the imagination. What I love about these poems is how this world and the next world rub up against each other as if the poet has peeled something away.” —Justin Lacour, A Season in Heck and Other Poems and editor of Trampoline: A Journal of Poetry

“There is a chastening, an encroaching of night into the senses, a holy agon in all great poetry. In Daniel Fitzpatrick’s refulgent Yonder in the Sun, the borderlines of Being and Memory crescendo into the faraway yet evocatively familiar land of all lands. Our poet lives within the sunset between this life and the next, between the heart’s own transience and the immortalizing wish which carves it anew, in that purgatorio of grace and glory. The poems are a lovemaking within the lifelong elegy of ecstasy, entanglement, and surrender. The beauty of this collection is in the entreating of the other to recover for the first time, the great oceanic trust in the hidden God Who resides in unending wells within and beyond us: ‘You must come close before your soul/swims into view at the bottom of the doubled world./ That second self will float in eyes like altars/ curved as gently as the earth/ to give you back this you/ which is not you, mirrored and multiplied.’” —Caitlin Smith Gilson, author of Rhapsody and Redolence and Tregenna Hill

“A masterpiece of the sublime!” —Dr. Sebastian Mahfood, OP, author of The Narrative Spirituality of Dante’s Divine Comedy

“A delightful blend of imagery, fact, memory, meaning, and myth!” —Fr. Dennis Billy, CSsR, author of His Divine Presence and A Time Will Come

“A dancer took off her makeup and costume and asked, “What more is there to life?” A woman who walked the catwalk answered the same question. Both of them became contemplative nuns. The author of His Divine Presence invites us to ponder ‘Who’ exists when the makeup, the dressing up, the busyness of life, the noise and the activities all cease.” – Francis Etheredge, author of The Prayerful Kiss, The Family on Pilgrimage, and Honest Rust and Gold

”Scholar, author, and poet Rev. Dennis J. Billy (C.Ss.R.), with his new book His Divine Presence, gives us a deeply personal collection of poems that encourages us to focus more clearly on the gifts that God has freely bestowed upon us in this life but not to lose sight of this life’s true goal of sharing eternity with Him. The poem that gives the name to the entire book is particularly noteworthy in that it profoundly shows us the vast extent of God’s blessings that He has given to all of us. There are also poems that are deep and meaningful exhortations to trust in God’s love and goodness along with others that urge us to prepare ourselves gladly for an eternity with Him. These are thus poems that help us to contemplate His Divine Presence with joy, both in the life of this world and in the life to come.” – Charles Rex, author of It Is My Soul That Sings

“Fr. Billy’s poems open part of the contemplative process behind faith. We see the human, priestly mind counselling, reflecting, confessing, advising and doubting in targeted expression. His faith is palpable in this writing that connects the inner self in the world to God and to others. It highlights the sacramental nature of God’s church.” – Larry Hopperton, author of Table for Three and Such Common Stories

“Fr. Dennis Billy’s poetry will guide you to the cloud of unknowing and into silent awe, and your soul will smile and your heart will dance!” – Joe Avalos, author of Cry Oneness