The title of this collection of poems employs the word mourning 
in a manner that expands the strict definition of the word and 
crosses the ordinary boundaries of the senses, where color, 
time, and place are triggers to memory and experience. The reader 
will be taken on an odyssey including sixteenth-century England, 
the ancient hills of Spain, a Renoir painting in Ft. Worth, a 
precarious cliffside inn on California's Highway One, a rare-book 
library in the heart of Houston, a high-school gym in Georgia, an 
East Texas pine forest, and the violet crowned hills of Austin. The 
forays collected in this volume always return to Texas, most notably 
Austin, where the power of childhood memories shed light on the 
author's life experiences during the pivotal periods of the sixties and 
seventies. Examples include poems chronicling the day of the 
University of Texas tower sniper tragedy and the award winning poem 
"Night Hawk," recording the time that the poet ran face to chest into 
LBJ in a popular restaurant, a poem, like the writer's collection, 
recapturing unique and complicated times with irony, wit, and joyful 
mourning.

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DAVID M. PARSONS'S first book of poems, Editing Sky, was the 
1999 Texas Review Press Poetry Prize winner and a 2000 Violet 
Crown Book Award finalist. A graduate of the University of Houston's 
creative writing program, Parsons is a past recipient of a National 
Endowment for the Humanities Dante fellowship to the State 
University of New York and the French/American Legation Poetry 
Prize. He is serving as the Montgomery County, Texas, Poet 
Laureate (2005–2010). Parsons is married to award-winning graphic 
designer/fine artist Nancy Parsons.