“David Craig’s poems are small perfections that deserve to be cupped, like birds, in the palms of one’s hands, their hearts beating steadily, their wings set for flight. Thirty-three years’ worth of homage to saints and holy sinners, psalms and celebrations, prayers and prophecies all gather to a greatness in these pages, a worthy testament to the faithful life and work of this modern day devotional poet, his fierce love of the word, the world, the men and women who inhabit it, and the God who made it all. St. Francis Bar & Grill will buoy you up, break your heart, and make you glad to be alive. And isn’t that what poems are supposed to do?” – Angela Alaimo O’Donnell, author of Holy Land, Dear Dante, and The View from Childhood: New and Selected Poems

“‘If a thing is dull / It is not Christian,’ writes St. Philip Neri, a statement David Craig uses as one of his epigraphs. These poems are not dull! They crackle with telling detail, imaginative leaps, playful wit, and profound insights—the hallmarks of Craig’s poetry. More they are imbued with a sensibility attuned to the presence of God. Inhabiting that sensibility as a reader can refresh the imagination and make you more attuned to the ways God is at work in the world and in your own life.” – Eric Potter, author of Things Not Seen

“In one of David Craig’s poems from St. Francis Bar and Grill (a poem about Brother Giles), the poet avers ‘they lamented / the world they’d missed. // So, Giles met them, too, halfway.’ In this open-hearted, wise and embracing collection, as he has throughout his long and fruitful poetic journey, Craig goes out of his way to meet saints and would-be saints, at least halfway, wherever he (or they) happen to be. And if he does not go all the way—that is to say, move in with them—it is because he wants to hear what they have to say aloud, and thus bring their voice to the reader. With close to 250 pages, spanning 33 years of poems, there is far more in this collection than can be brought to light here: decades of daily living where heaven and earth engage in constant conversation. In one of my favorite poems, and what must be a magisterial celebration of the Communion of Saints, we read: “Who of us has gathered flowers / enough for heaven?” And then the answer… ‘Our consolation is always / that many have! And so, though / slowly, we get that change, both here / and in our going.’  At the heart of this poetic tour-de-force is the convicted embrace of that saintly communion, its grandeur and its quirkiness, its queries and its wise returns. Leaning on St. Francis and St. Therese, St. Clair and St Alphonse, Mary, the Mother of God—may the heavens and earth praise her!—and his own spiritual discovery, Craig, whose poetry ever captures the pulse of the human heart, points us time and again to the immersive presence of God in His fallen but beloved world. ‘God travelling, as He always has / on as many roads as necessary, / never clueing us in, using / each stump and stirrup, giving us / what we need… never asking permission.’ Oh, to be reminded of that with such beautiful poetry! What a gift this is to the reader!” – Sofia M. Starnes, author of The Consequence of Moonlight and other works, Poet Laureate of Virginia, Emerita

“One of David Craig’s gifts from the beginning of his work is his ability to use the temporal and spiritual in a transformative manner, so that daily life accounts acquire purpose and direction and things we do almost without thinking are charged with meaning.  The poems awaken in the reader a desire to reach in and out, to identify the milestones in his or her own spiritual journey.  These are powerful poems which belong on the shelf with Merton, Hopkins and Eliot.” – Dr. Janet McCann, an American poet, scholar, and professor emerita (after 46 years of teaching English and creative writing) at Texas A&M University

“A striking and contemplative collection, Craig’s poems embody a lived Franciscan imagination—where humility, poverty, and grace converge—inviting readers into a world where the ordinary is transfigured by divine presence and poetic vision.” – Dr. Sebastian Mahfood, OP, author of The Narrative Spirituality of Dante’s Divine Comedy

“Taken singly, each poem is wonderfully crafted and deeply wise. Taken together, they stand as an achievement that is nothing less than monumental. They confirm what I have long suspected, that David Craig is among the finest poets writing today.” – William Bedford Clark, editor of The Selected Letters of Robert Penn Warren

“Craig’s verses ring with his characteristic turning to Christ in all situations amid a recounting of every-telling–and just-often-enough-outlandish–details of everyday life.  His regular nod to suffering and bodily death grounds these poems in extra heft, but a heft balanced by a poet’s gratitude for life’s greatest gifts: the sacraments, devoted relationships, leaves and breezes, the chance to glimpse the Trinity’s glory in the smallness of it all.” –  Jacob Riyell, Associate Professor of English, Marquette University

“For David Craig, God is in the details.  His world is beautifully sacramental, and so is his poetry.  In his poems, frost-covered blades of grass convey grace, as do metal casings, pinecones in the snow, other people (especially those close to him), and every carefully-chosen word.  Expecting the wondrous is what Advent is all about. . . . David Craig has a gift for seeing the infinite ways in which matter and spirit are intertwined, and how expectations of redemption fill every moment.  A wonderful and poignant celebration of the Word made flesh, perfectly laced with humor.” – Carlos Eire, winner of the National Book Award for WAITING FOR SNOW IN HAVANA

“This is a book of joy, an Easter of jubilation.  Holiness infuses these poems: holy flights of imagination, holy laughter, hold living in the everyday, and holy resurrection hope.  Even the punishing season of winter is ‘a glass of chilled champagne.’  And angels everywhere–materializing to sing a Bach mass in the middle of the night on an empty street, or maybe dropping in for a summer swim.  The energy, the down-to-earth reverence–is all of a piece, creating an abundance of blessings for any reader fortunate enough to step inside the world David Craig writes and lives.” – Jill Paleaz Baumgaertner, Poetry Editor, CHRISTIAN CENTURY

“With his immediately recognizable voice–wry but reverent–and uncommonly deft prosodic skill, David Craig’s new poems serve to resurrect the beauty of formal structures bearing uncontainable and exultant spirit into view.” – Scott Cairns, author of SLOW PILGRIM and ANAPHORA

“It’s possible that what David Craig has fashioned here is a new Book of Common Prayer.  Within the universe of devotions, Craig is able to bring about observations and observances that shine with wit and existential piety which succeeds in erasing the distance between perceiving subject and perceived objects, between the quasi-fictional speaker and the chair he sits in.  The fluidity of subject, predicate, object in the lived understanding of universal Oneness in the being of God becomes, as in Wallace Stevens, ‘the motive for metaphor,’ and the reader can dissolve in the poems’ momentary transformations.” – Bill Tremblay, author of WALKER ALONG THE DITCH: POEMS

“David Craig is a psalmist who praises the complexity of the way, as St. John of the Cross once deliberated its darkness, as Gerard Manley Hopkins celebrated the strangeness and depth of the visions which bust one through illusion.  I believe David Craig to be the foremost religious poet of the day whose special gift is to reveal the presence and care of God in all things–especially the most unlikely things.  He gives us poems as rich in humanity as they are in the mystery of God . . . . This is a major work in the mystical tradition.” – Howard McCord, author of COLLECTED POEMS

“David Craig’s poetry takes you on a journey from the deepest, most solemn experiences of Christian spirituality to the precious, everyday moments of life whose vitality and poignancy we so often miss.  There is the presence of the mystic in Craig’s voice.  His poetry stirs the mind to awaken to the sacredness of the present moment while not downplaying the rawness of the human experience.  The power of language and its sublime ability to elevate our souls to an intimate awareness of personal struggle, spiritual understanding, and aesthetical appreciation, pervade this rich and beautiful collection.” – Daniel Maria Klimek, TOR, Assistant Professor, Theology Dept, FUS

“David Craig’s poems read like something written by a hip Franciscan, filled with a surprising sense of self-effacement and humility, mixed with a continual note of celebration for the things of this world: sunsets, sunrises, the chirp of birds, his beautiful family, the happy howl of his two dogs.  Somehow, he makes you feel, as he says, as if Jesus were, in fact, ‘to walk down the middle of our street happy to sit with us on our back porch,’ to ‘talk about wherever we need to belong to/at the moment.” – Paul Mariani, author of EPITAPHS FOR THE JOURNEY

“David Craig is one of the best poets working today.  HIs poetic vision might be best described as ‘mystical realism,’ and to serve that vision, Craig has evolved a demotic yet lyric style that resembles Emily Dickinson’s in its nerve-end economy, William Carlos Williams’s in its plain-spoken diction and disarmingly unpretentious tropes, and CK Williams’s in its candor of address.” – David Impastato, editor of UPHOLDING MYSTERY

“These poems are brilliant, such a delight to read. . . . David Craig’s EVERY TONGUE CONFESS is a poetic exploration of the human condition that manages to be at once playful and profound, whimsical and wise, earthy and other-worldly. . . . Jesus appears in these poems as infinitely patient, willing to bow low to meet us poor, sinful pilgrims where we are.  Read these poems–they will give your soul rare sustenance.” – Christine Schintgen, former President of OLSWA

“The name Craig will be mentioned with the likes of Donne, Blake, Whitman, Dickinson, Frost, Eliot and Merton.  Couldn’t stop reading.  Had 2 send this text 2 give myself a break.  Incredible . . . congratulations.” – Duane Drotar, Catholic Activist

“A compelling pleasure . . . David Craig longs for the eternal amid the pleasure and trials of the quotidian.  He catches glimpses of the Everlasting that reveal the large coherence, his mortal place in the immortal plan.  These lovely lyrical meditations are self-effacing but also self-assured . . . : “Oh great God of the universe/hear us as we move our losses aside/Let that be our voice, our answer.” – Andrew Hudgins, author of A CLOWN AT MIGNIGHT: POEMS

“In poem after poem, Craig helps us see his and our foolishness; still, the self-deprecating voice here is also the voice of wonder: how mysteriously and gracefully we get though our lives even when we are ‘still everything we aren’t.’  Craig can be devilishly funny, heartbreaking, and profoundly searching as he examines all those human failures and frailties that make us all one another.” – Robert Cording, author of ONLY SO FAR

“I love the rollicking piety in this new collection from David Craig. As he says: ‘The sun is so bright/it leaves teeth marks on his soul.’ Here the timeless and the temporal collide as the apprentice tries on his varied opportunities like costumes. This is kaleidoscopic reading–turn the page and fresh colors and images flash. Brilliant poetry!” – Luci Shaw, author of SCAPE

“As French film director Francois Triffaut mused, ‘When humor can be made to alternate with melancholy, one has a success, but when the same things are funny and melancholy . . . it’s just wonderful’–as is David Craig’s newest book, TROUBLE IN THE DIOCESE.” – Marjorie Maddox, author of LOCAL NEWS FROM SOMEPLACE ELSE