title: The Consequence of Moonlight: Poems
author: Sofia Starnes
description: <DIV>With uncommon prosodic and linguistic elegance, Sofia Starnes brings to the onetime familiar an exhilarating vividness, a [re]vision that avails the story&rsquo;s ongoing opening, continuing agency.<BR /> &mdash;Scott Cairns, author of <I>Slow Pilgrim: The Collected Poems</I> and other works<BR /> &#160;<BR /> Complexly ordered and layered, musically delivered, frequently profound, and brilliantly sensuous, Starnes&#39; newest collection carries us through the life of humans and the life of Christ. Her deeply intelligent poems demand our attention and reward it with the wizardry with which she builds and shapes her lines. There is wit, too, and poems that respond to biblical and exegetical quotations. This is not an easy book, yet &quot;[h]ow bruising-brave the larkspur&#39;s blue / becomes, how lover-heart // the roses&mdash;&quot; Resurrection is here remade fresh, new, vital, and within grasp.<BR /> &mdash;Kelly Cherry, author of <I>The Life and Death of Poetry: Poems </I>and other works<BR /> &#160;<BR /> How aptly titled <I>The Consequence of Moonlight</I> is. Here you will find a treasury of poems filled with an exquisite beauty and a kind of celestial music one rarely hears in contemporary poetry. But these lyrics, these songs, come with a warning with its invitation. Reader, you will have to slow down and allow the transforming moonlight of these lines to enter into your own sacred space. Starnes is at pains to erase herself as much as she can to allow the reader to discover something deep and profound within oneself. Welcome to a charged and grace-lit inner world, where you are not to put a name on everything you think you find here, but by warming yourself in this garden of delights might return a changed person, and the better for it.<BR /> &mdash;Paul Mariani, author of <I>Deaths &amp; Transfigurations</I> and other works<BR /> &#160;<BR /> Although the answers to the big questions may be different for each of us, the questions remain the same, and Sofia Starnes is a poet&#160;who asks all the right questions.&#160; In the fine poems collected in <I>The Consequence of Moonlight</I>, we get a rare reward, the observations&#160;<BR /> and insights of a talented and thoughtful poet attempting to examine the world through a spiritual lens.<BR /> &mdash;David Bottoms, author of <I>We Almost Disappear</I> and other works<BR /> &#160;<BR /> In her new collection, <I>The Consequence of Moonlight</I>, Sofia Starnes considers the nature of home, of children, of the creation where we live as creatures of God. &#160;In one striking line she writes, &ldquo;God digs into his resurrection.&rdquo; &#160;And in these poems Starnes digs into the incarnation. &#160;Though the poems often seem ethereal and even otherworldly, basking in the reflected light of the moon, they have an edge. &#160;They mark that membrane shared by body and soul. &#160;I have written elsewhere that Starnes is part of the great tradition of poets, from Solomon to John Donne, who marry sensuality to religious belief. &#160;Her new poems remain part of that tradition. &#160;We are lucky to have them.<BR /> &mdash;Mark Jarman, author of <I>The Heronry&#160;</I>and other works<BR /> &#160;</DIV>
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  25 CHAPTERS SCANNED & OCR : complete. Minor mistakes throughout ebook.
  
    
  
  EPILOGUE
  
    
  
  October 27, 1805
  
    
  
  "Oh, Serafina, it's beautiful!" Els cried, following her through the first
  floor of the yellow villa. "No wonder we never sec- you at court anymore.
  You've made a little paradise here!"
  
    
  
  Serafina grinned and brushed a curl behind her ear, beck oning her best friend
  into the dining room. "Look at the fresco." She pointed at the ceiling, where
  the rich colons of the Baroque painting had been carefully restored. Mars and
  Ven u s were caught in their golden net and looked not a whit sorry for it.
  
    
  
  Els laughed, marveling. "Reminds me of a couple I know
  
    
  
  Serafina chuckled. "Come, I'll show you the morning room. It gets such
  wonderful light that I have half a citrus orchard growing in there."
  
    
  
  The completion of the repairs and remodeling of the house had coincided with
  the end of the threat of war that had hung over 