. . .it is rare to read a poet so entirely dedicated to the idea, no, to the feeling, of the world as logos, of the world made tangible, motile, and breathing. --Fred Chappell, Author of Midquest, from the Foreword David Hickman is a great poet of the spiritual soul. He has an astounding capacity to listen and hear the voice of dark luminosity that grounds existence. Things are said in this volume that I have tried for decades to say and have failed. This book brings comfort because it speaks truth, raw and beautiful. It finds hope in the darkest places, struggles with the deepest of human conflicts, and finds poignant delicacy where you would not expect it. Robert Sardello. Author of Love and the World. Reading What the Silence Says, one feels both welcome guest and privileged company to witness words morphing into revelatory tropes, details blooming into the absolute. Hickman speaks not only of the commonplace, but also of those hard to see walls it is our place as humans to negotiate. These poems challenge the western nucleus of assumptions that define our lives with a reckoning that is playful, yet at the same time dead serious. Stephen Roberts, Author of A Space Within A Space