Frank X. Gaspar’s collection of poems is haunted by the presence of mystics and visionaries: Mohammed, Buddha, St. Paul, Augustine, George Herbert, Emily Dickinson, Blake, Milton, Rilke. A Field Guide to the Heavens is punctuated with designs of science, the wondering and rapt observations of the sky made at the eyepiece of a backyard telescope. We come to know Gaspar’s city streets, the neighbors and strangers that walk them, the wreckage of past lives, the ocean, the gardens, the orchards and alleys and parking lots, all spread out under the vast sky.

“In Frank Gaspar’s beautiful and exacting book, A Field Guide to the Heavens, is a compassed and sculptured map that leads to what is purely human. There aren’t any abstract angels here, only the breath of quest and raw life—from the symbolic gecko to the mythic Apostle Paul and Caesar. This collection is highly democratic and spiritual, where George Herbert is only a few pages away from Allen Ginsberg. Gaspar’s material is composed of the stuff we are made of: an approximation of the old, need-driven songs of the spirit and flesh shaped out of imagination and autobiography.”—Yusef Komunyakaa

"This poet is a good storyteller. He knows what will interest you, and he doesn't present himself as transcendental. . . . I like the way he talks about a dozen things in one poem."—Robert Bly

“Frank Gaspar has arrived, in this book, at an adult voice of startling presence and power, a voice at once humble and confident, doubting and authoritative . . . . he returns us to poetry’s perennial, inexhaustible power: the old verities of the self’s engagement with love and time, with meaning and chaos, are shaped here into something alive, something generous, selfless, and new.”—Mark Doty

• CONTENTS 
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• I. 
• Metropolis
• A Field Guide to the Heavens
• Dog Days
• Metropolis
• Now the Moon Is in the First Quarter
• The Tree
• I Work Late at My Table in Summer
• First Epistle in June
• July in the Street of Fevers
• Psalms in August
• The Lemons
• George Herbert
• Seven Roses
• I See Men but They Look Like Trees Walking
• Last Hymn to Night
• II. 
• Jailhouse Tattoos
• The Fire and the Rose
• A Spell Against Ruin
• September Tropical
• Among the Quadi, on the River Gran
• The Apostle Paul Disappears into a Crowd at Corinth
• An Ark Cast into the Flags
• Shook Foil
• Part of What I Mean
• Honokaa Town, Geckos Chirping, Deep Night, No Telescope
• Delta Scuti
• North
• Barnard 352
• The Lilies of the Field
• What Good Are the Stars
• III. 
• This Small Book of Days
• This Small Book of Days
• Lines Written Against the Day This Hand Will Tremble
• A Witness Gives His Version
• Moon by Night
• Nox Erat et Caelo
• I Am Refused Entry to the Harvard Poetry Library
• February
• Whiskey
• Dream Talk
• When Lilacs
• Kapital
• Small Prayer for the World Without Mercy on Us
• Fortunate Rain, Lucky Star
• The Standard Times
• Education by Stone
• Confessions

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