Praise for better gods. Chuck O'Neil's a poet with a painter's eye for 'daily wonders'. With plain-spoken eloquence, with lyricism and humor, the poems in this exceptional collection 'say their say' about what lifts us up, what lays us low. better gods is a book of common psalms, reminding us (in the words of Galway Kinnell) what it is . . . to be on earth at this moment.

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In Chuck O’Neil’s fresh new collection, Holding Things Together, so many of the poems illustrate and illuminate his volume’s title, for holding things together is precisely (in the many meanings of the phrase) what these keenly reflective homages to locality, to family, to continuity, to place and to history do. Clarity of language, generosity of feeling, rhythmic delicacy: in their fluidly unpunctuated stanzas the poems are as well-hewn, shaped, and planed as a piece of precious wood (‘scaling lengths minding alignments’). The local is O’Neil’s landscape, whether in lovingly unsentimental poems for his wife and family, for his town past and present, or for his natural surroundings. It is a celebration, too, of work—manual, thoughtful, emotionally-aware work—including the work of poem-making itself, out of which he has composed this garland of gifts for the rest of us, holding all together.

— Eamon Grennan

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Beyond Basilicas is a remarkable collection the way it calls out across the decades and speaks to this present moment. With plainspoken reverence for the local life, O’Neil’s work is, as ever, finely-wrought, its lines tuned like a drumhead with just the right tension: ‘Rimshots and paradiddles popping off / The snare into that blue / Connecticut milltown morning air.’

‘Backstory,’ the volume’s signature poem is meditative, elegiac, with hints of Ecclesiastes throughout — Vatican II and the Cold War, Kerouac, Thomas Merton, Eisenhower, Buddy Holly, Marylin Monroe, Frank Lloyd Wright, Viet Nam, Woodstock’s ‘marinated’ fields— events of the past life recollected, living on, shaping us still.

With its sense of everyday earthly spirituality, Beyond Basilicas stands its ground: ‘It’s heaven enough down here / Eden as is.’ The poems in this book of remembrance hinge on hope. And, crucially, they pay attention. To history. To the ancestors. The first kiss. The watering can. The reception. To what happened. What happens.

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