“The sensuous world of the mind and the art of lived experience intersect in John Barrale’s Poems for the Camel. Like a dream traveler and like a bearer of torches, the poet’s lyrical voice aches and slips into ancient worlds full of mysteries then returns to the trials and tribulations of present everyday life. These poems intrigue and captivate, shake us out of complacency as they trace vast paths yet remain intimate in fields of personal searches. Time crosscuts and overlaps and we surrender to being “There and not there./ A presence unseen but felt./ Stars and planets in the daytime sky.” And “after the long sigh of the violins wound you beyond repair,” and the secret life of the moon’s fingers open and close “over malignant swamps/ and choke forests/ of ferns,” we also rest as if viewing a luminous pre-Raphaelite painting, the “spread of a woman’s hair as she bathes in the river.” —Marisa Frasca, author of Via Incanto: Poems from the Darkroom