Amazon.com description: Product Description: In his fourth collection of poems, Sydney Lea remains true to the narrative values for which his verse has been widely recognized. Here, however, Lea becomes more contemplative-even more overtly religious---than before. There are some striking poems set in Italy, but Lea's territory for the most part is a region increasingly under siege- the small towns and shrinking wild country of upper New England: the flinty bailiwick, famous for "self-reliance" yet possessed of a distinctive culture and a communitarian urge, both of which Lea depicts tenderly but without sentimentality. Few contemporary writers in any genre know their region as intimately as Sydney Lea, and in keeping with a poetic paradox reaching back at least as far as Wordsworth, it is such apparently parochial knowledge that lends 'Prayer for the Little City' its widest resonances.