Hunger Wide as Heaven

Author: Max Garland

Publisher: Cleveland State University Poetry Center (2006)

“I’m a mad fan of the delicious, radiant poems of Max Garland. He even makes me feel closer to that old-time religion than I’ve felt in quite a while. There’s a welcoming world here you’ll recognize, as well as a wistfulness that feels perfectly pitched, leaning out to mystery. You can string his poems together in your mind, drape them from the door inside your head like a welcoming wreath, and you’ll feel better walking through it.”

–Naomi Shihab Nye 

“Max Garland finds, in ‘the knottiness / of things’—wind, tree, bird, sky, water, light, a father’s milk truck, a mother’s perfume—a music of resilience, and grace. Simultaneously elegy and celebration, these poems explore themes of time and mortality, God and faith, memory and redemption, with a meditative serenity and urgency, in an affectionate accessible voice. For Garland, poetry is ‘a way to speak a loss away,’ to embrace, in emptiness, strength; in diminishment, desire; in loss, recovery; in hunger wide as heaven, the possibility, at least, of fulfillment. This is a beautiful, beautiful book.”

–Ronald Wallace