Terence Culleton's second collection, Eternal Life, sparkles with a poetry that is witty and passionate, inspired and urbane, exploring life’s mysteries—family, love, religion, work—with compassion and faith. Each story is at heart an affirmation of what the heart knows best. A contemporary “Passionate Shepherd” incites his wife to frolic; a boy feels desire’s burgeoning against cruelty’s backdrop; a couple contends with the triumphs and catastrophies of childbirth and parenthood. The dead are memorialized, the ugly and neglected flash with beauty, and long-suppressed voices rise to the throat. Culleton celebrates what is essential about the human soul: its fortitude, its eccentricity, its grace. The ephemera of the everyday yield inevitably to what’s eternal and heart-breaking and enduringly ecstatic about our soul-time here in this garden we call Earth.