Songs of Desert Winds

And then was our world awoken

To desert stars and Heaven's clime,

The image strewn, through centuries broken,

Recollected in its Paradigm

--

Let all be still beside that stream

Where only little children dream...

Let all be still beside that Breath

Which blows across both life and death

--

All the fled and fleeting strands of time

Weave together in a greater rhyme

"William Dunn writes with a simplicity reminiscent of his masters, the English Romantics and the agrarian poets of America. Like Wordsworth, he lives in uninterrupted dialogue with his childhood; as he sees it, the child is not only the father of the man, but the man's best teacher, if only he would listen. Like Robert Frost and Wendell Berry, Dunn is a poet who finds a universe of meaning in the particularities of a familiar and beloved landscape. He knows Europe well-he has lived in England, Austria, and Italy-but again and again his memory and imagination lead him back, with gratitude, to the woods, lakes, and prairies of Oklahoma.... And if William Dunn knows that the world is wonderful because it has been created by God, he recognizes the still greater wonder of its re-creation by God's Son, incarnate of the Virgin Mary." -Fr. John Saward

"I have known and admired William Dunn's poetry for many years. He is both a true mystic and a true philosopher. What makes him a true poet is the eloquence with which his mystical and philosophical musings are expressed with a poignant starkness. Reading his verse, we are taken into God's mystical Presence but also into the desolation of his absence. Few poets are able to take such a penetrative delve and dive into darkness, without losing sight of redeeming light." -Joseph Pearce