McDowell often ends his poems with a challenge to "Jim, " a question usually asking him to make sense of his life. Yet as we feel our way through the earlier stanzas, living within their diaphanous walls, we overhear this final question as if it were directed at us. One of the joys of reading McDowell's poetry is precisely this-that his questions urge us to make deeper sense of our own lives. You will discover, along with him, the almost seamless way the ordinary and non ordinary realities of our soul's deep dreaming support and create a multi-layered world to live in. It is a world that intrigues us while reading the poem and that lingers long after we lay the poem aside." -Tom Cowan, from the foreword of Night, Mystery & Light