Poets have always known that life tells a story and that the story is the stuff of myth. Poetry long embodied what theology and psychology only now begin to describe: the inner journey from within the world, midway between its beginning and its end. In his fourth book, Death Mother and Other Poems, Frederick Morgan continues to find incidents and images to body forth his journey and its sure but shadowy destination, "that other life to come."

Plainly and figuratively, Morgan writes of his own unfolding story, its emptiness and moments of fulfillment, its angers and affections, its pain and exultation. Each poem compels our attention for its autobiographical truth or its spiritual significance. Morgan balances his inner and outer worlds with rare clarity, so that the whole man speaks in each line….

Above all, death as a personal event and a transcendental experience reappears throughout the poems...