by Richard Miles, Poet/Teacher, former director, Iowa Writers School, Poetry Division

Ms. Lombardi's Tuscany Light poems combine to give us an actual heaven. In the Tuscan hills, San Gimignano and its convento is a retreat to which she withdraws periodically, both in person and in imagination while at home on the Maine coast. Lending shape to these poems are the bones of Italy--figs, persimmons, dogs, walnuts, bread, apples, wine, brothers and their chants--in this enchanted, time-stopped town where the physical and the spiritual overlap.