" Learning to Jump is a book full of character, color, and intimacy. Sean McDowell is a poet who illuminates the bonds that lightly (so lightly we hardly notice) hold us together and keep us from falling apart. Here we wander with a wanderer, a scholar who has left his library, and we travel far, from Seattle's Pacific Northwest to rain-soaked Connemara in the west of Ireland, to explore what might be gained or lost along the way." --Tony Curtis, author of This Flight Tonight "We have long celebrated Sean McDowell's many achievements as critic, teacher, editor, and executive director of the John Donne Society. This book demonstrates his impressive poetic gifts. He has an ear and a mind and a heart for sound effects, for precise and often surprising words, and for startlingly original images. Many poems explore details of the natural, everyday world, where, in these moving lyrics, the secular and spiritual interact and intersect." --Heather Dubrow, chair in poetic imagination, Fordham University " Learning to Jump transports the reader to 'a place / that is no place and every place / at the heart of heartfelt melody.

' At the heart of the poet's heartfelt melodies, you'll find several achingly beautiful love poems. This is a wonderful book with fresh poems you will return to again and again with deepening pleasure. There's a daring newness, too, in how Sean McDowell uses plain, direct speech. I applaud the new possibilities he brings to our time." --Greg Miller, professor emeritus of English, Millsaps College "Under his poet's gaze, the small and common things of the world ascend into Sean McDowell's nearly reverent attention to be simultaneously affirmed as needful in themselves and expanded into resonances beyond themselves. As McDowell urges his reader, over and again in a variety of ways, to 'Look closely,' so he enlists us in the extraordinary work of being enthralled by the ordinary." --Kimberly Johnson, author of Fatal "There is a peculiar state we enter when we've read a good poem, a sort of 'post-poem' reverie, eyes unfocused, turned inward, a letting go of barriers, allowing whatever might come to go ahead and change our lives. Reading McDowell, I find myself in this welcome condition over and over.

He combines the discipline and patience of an internationally acclaimed scholar with a sensibility that recognizes the difference between poems that can be written and, like these, ones that should be. I love this book." --Samuel Green, author of Disturbing the Light.