APPEARING BY DAYLIGHT
     Poems by David Herrstrom
     Drawings by Jacob Landau

[Aegina Press, 88 pages (6"x9"), 12 B/W line drawings, ISBN 1-56002-213-2]

In this new collection of poems, biblical myths emerge out of the mist of
obscurity like Lazarus himself. And this is fortunate since Lazarus joins
Jonah and Jesus as a key player in the volume. These stories, so often 
homogenized by Sunday School sentimentality, take on sinew and bone. 
Jonah, Lazarus, and Jesus are real pilgirms muddling through life just like
us and at the same time mental travelers. They are both comic book heroes 
(as we are passed between words and pictures) and wise fools.

Jonah, for example, doesn't simply take a three-day vacation in a sensory 
deprivation vat, he undergoes a recapitulation of his own big-bellied 
gestation and birth. And at the end he's not at all sure he's keen on the 
god who designed this dramatic recreation of his first traumatic expulsion
into life and responsibility. The last we see of Jonah, he's "picking God / 
out of his hair / cracking him under his nail / like a flea" ("His Anger").

Here is storytelling with just the right amount of sound and silence. A 
silence charged by Jacob Landau's drawings, where dismembered figures 
reminiscent of Ezekiel's valley of dry bones alternate with those 
re-membered and fluid with life. Finally, we sit riveted to the telling 
of ourselves in these poems, not wanting the freedom we thought we had. 
--Elizabeth Morgan (activist and Professor of English, Eastern College)

Send order with payment of $8.00 (includes postage) to:

     David Herrstrom
     P.O. Box 219
     Roosevelt, NJ 08555

pfp@njcc.com