Our rivers are hiding in the ground, and to trace

them to source, is a passing through the narrowed

auricles and ventricles of an ancient heart.

  from “Our Rivers are Hiding”

The poet Sean Sexton is as American as Whitman and Sandburg and Frost and as far-reaching as Akhmatova and Yeats and Neruda. His collection, Portals, is as expansive in subject, tone, and structure as it is breathtaking in the lyrical quality of its craftsmanship and language. Reading this stunning collection is like looking inside the workings of the mind and soul and spirit of a man who has given his life to poetry but also to nature, family, friends, art, music, and—if that’s not enough—the arduous life-work of a cattle rancher. Sexton has taken upon himself to trace to their source the great mysteries of this world and, as much as possible, to shine a light into its vast and ancient heart.

—Cathy Smith Bowers, former North Carolina Poet Laureate and author of The Abiding Image

The pastoral of Vergil’s Georgics and Bucolics is one of convention, unlike the grueling, hands-on engagement reported in the poems of cattleman-poet Sean Sexton. He is the first I know of to make the realities of animal husbandry available for poetry. The plethora of gritty detail, by the transformative power of art, comes to mean more than the bare facts. Sexton is fully in touch with the cruelty involved in controlling the life and death of creatures he recognizes as conscious individuals. I speculate that writing about it is for him a kind of atonement, one that begins with an implied self-incrimination. Meanwhile, the poems, seasoned by long experience, pour forth, musically hitting the pail, nourishment for the minds and heart of those receiving them.

—Alfred Corn, author of The Returns: Collected Poems

What a beauty of a book you hold in your hands. Sean Sexton’s Portals is a meditation on living, on dying, on memory, on the labor of our hands when they are connected to “the roots of creation.” Formally inventive, crafted with a keen ear ever attuned to the profound, these poems are filled with hard truths, while consolation is woven throughout, as in the poem, “Voices”: “The sound rises, spreads / its solace upon the land apprehending the gloom / and in this moment it is easy once again / to believe in things to come.” Portals is a book of love poems, a book of wisdom earned through deep attention, that which asks, “What is most alive, which the dying?” Just read “Eating the Heifer” or “Departure”—you’ll know right off that this is a book to carry with you for the rest of your days. 

—Brian Turner, author of Here, Bullet and The Wild Delight of Wild Things