The occasion for this poetic meditation is a colorless quartz crystal sitting upon the writer's desk. The crystal is as still and irreducible as a death's head in St. Jerome's study or Cezanne's studio. But what would the crystal reveal, if it could speak? How might the issue of its presence be brought into language? The poet of The Crystal Text, by means of a rare stamina of attention and listening vulnerability, seeks to become the medium of the crystal's transmissions.

Like many other Coolidge works, The Crystal Text sounds the depths of a visionary excavation of present being. Faced daily, Coolidge's quest is to know anything, to write everything. And what is revealed here in the glancing light of his language's mineral beauty is the writing mind itself. Its precision, its weights and measures, its peerless word choice and shutter speed all combine in passages of inspired momentum to bring the reader cognitions of a unique and exemplary kind.