With Manna Anew to Reap

George W. Cooper and Shelly B. Pittman have been writing in conversation with each other for years, trading verses the way old friends trade stories. What emerges is a dual-voice collection that moves between sunrise psalms and backyard theater, elegies for the departed and haiku for the ordinary miracle of a hummingbird at a feeder. There are poems of nature and light - wrens nesting in a soffit, an orchid backlit at a window, autumn trees shedding "leaves of prejudice and pride." There are poems of memory and loss, of race and belonging in America, and poems that turn, again and again, toward the sacred: toward a God who "verily is the all sufficing."Together, these fifty poems read less like two separate collections than like a single long conversation - one that circles themes of oneness, renewal, and the "manna anew" that comes to those willing to reap it.A gift, offered in the spirit it was written: as a bond of brotherhood.