Poems of great passion and tenderness, as close to rapture as a writer can get and still hold on.

E. Alex Pierce's voice can be heard echoing down the long corridors of memory and myth. It's not that these poems live in the past; instead, they manage to bring it back to life with uncanny sensual details and an urgency that makes you realize some fires never really go out. The book's scope is wide: beautifully crafted family reminiscences; Bach and Beethoven; Raphael and Goltzius; Shakespeare; the Greek Myths and the fate of the Romanovs. Vox Humana is all lilt and discipline in its courtliness, its surrender to the theatre of the moment at its most alive.