These poems wander through life and memory. They explore art, music, and history, but in an atmosphere of subtropical wonder. Beauty and truth are close relations and the author explores both as memories of an earlier Florida compose a world of recall and invitation.
""This is the Summer beach read that brings the beach to you. A volume of shorter poems that indeed open doors, and behind each one, a vacation. The poetry is awash with imagery from coastal Florida, but Niehaus shows himself to be just as adept at transporting his readers into the classicist's library or an English Cathedral as he is at capturing the feeling of a front porch or a quiet marina. There is a wonderful nostalgia, sometimes recalled as an ocean only looked upon, at other times evoked as the poet dives below the surface, securing such treasures as 'Sun and sand and sea all spoke of you / And won my soul to love / and as I sank / Among the warm, shallow waters I / Could hardly imagine any other' (Palm Beach Inlet). There is simplicity here, yet also depth. There is beauty here. An afternoon's reading in Sea Grapes and Sea Oats will leave you longing to know those things that Niehaus knows: a paradise he has found within, and yet another that lies ahead of him.""
--Alison Gerber, pastor, poet, author of Bible Study & Meditation: Spiritual Practices for Everyday Life
Jeffrey Jay Niehaus is both a poet and Old Testament scholar at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary. He has written a number of scholarly works, including God at Sinai, Ancient Near Eastern Themes in Biblical Theology and a three volume Biblical Theology. Niehaus received his PhD in English Literature from Harvard University in 1976 and is the author of Preludes: An Autobiography in Verse, Sonnets Subtropical and Existential, and God the Poet: Exploring the Origin and Nature of Poetry.
