Five Senses

Five Senses is a collection that captures the raw, immediate pleasure of being alive in a body. Written by Arthur Macy, a Nantucket native of Quaker heritage, these poems attend to the world the way a sailor reads weather: with attention, respect, and hard-won wisdom. The title itself promises what the verses deliver: an unhurried reckoning with sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch. Here is no abstract philosophy but rather the physical fact of existence, rendered in language that smells of salt air and sounds like conversation on a porch at dusk. Macy's Quaker sensibility infuses these works with a quiet radicalism: the belief that the material world is not a distraction from the spiritual but its clearest expression. These are poems for readers who have ever stood at the edge of the ocean and felt their own smallness, then found that smallness beautiful.