Sometimes the World Is Too Beautiful

Sometimes The World Is Too Beautiful combines poems selected from A Boy’s Face With Swan Wings  with recent poems. Set in the South, with references to Tennessee, the Gulf, Memphis, and Mississippi, the result is a book that reads as a book, not as a miscellany, offering section by section poems of nature, family, art, and marriage, and then, with the new poems, the painful dissolution of the marriage, a multi-faceted self-portrait, and finally, the elegiac “Grace” about the death of Lovitt’s mother.
“Sometimes The World Is Too Beautiful is a beautifully organized book, the first half made up of selected poems from A Boy’s Face With Swan Wings, 2004, poems of nature, family, art, and marriage, and the second half comprised of recent poems, 2005-2010. The division between the two is almost seamless. Sometimes The World Is Too Beautiful is a volume I watched, sometimes impatiently, carefully take shape across the years. It was worth the wait.”—D.C. Berry, author of Saigon Cemetery, Divorce Boxing, Vietnam Ecclesiastes, Hamlet Off Stage, A Week on the Chunky and Chickasawhay