“Twenty Poems to Nourish Your Soul” is more than an annotated anthology of inspirational verse. It's a story of the love of two people for each other and for the devotion to poetry that drew them together.

Authors of insightful comments about each of the 20 works they selected for this book are 11th Circuit Judge Charles G. Reynard of Bloomington and journalist Judith Valente, a public radio and television correspondent. Married for two years, they live in Normal.

A theme that recurs throughout their writings involves the fateful forks in the roads of one's life path. In one direction lie experiences and achievements that can turn out more opportune than those that might have been encountered in another direction.

And so often, those pathways lead away from disappointment and despair and become epiphanies that point to new challenges and successes.

For Judy Valente, one challenge was being laid off by the Wall Street Journal a year after having been a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize a second time.

Her 15 years of professional experience withered in the 15 seconds it took to read the termination memo, she told a Printers Row Book Fair audience in Chicago on June 9, when she and her partner read some of the “Twenty Poems.”

Valente's commentary centers on a few lines from “The Summer Day” by Mary Oliver: “Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” She expresses gratitude for the layoff that opened doors to a new career in poetry.

For Charley Reynard, one of many turning points evolved from a heated campaign for his election to a third term as McLean County state's attorney. A bitter debate with an opponent escalated into a well-publicized street brawl that he describes in detail.

He cites “To the Mistakes,” by W. S. Merwin, as an indication that “our mistakes often stare us right in the face before we make them, though we are too dim to notice.” The jealous mistress of the law, in time, intervened in his first marriage.

Reynard has included one of his own poems, “Juvenile Day,” in the book. It deals in composite with his Tuesdays in juvenile court in Pontiac, in many ways the worst days in his week but in other ways, the best.

He speaks to a youngster he calls “Danny” with hope that on one of the days in which they interact, the judge will “see the smallest steps forward” from the chronic misery of interminable institutional failure.

“Juvenile Day,” ends with poignant frustration: “Blessed son, I hold you in my hand, so helpless to help, so blind to watch over you in your garden of griefs.”

In a chapter he titles “The Art of Complication,” Reynard confesses to “an almost obsessive fascination with the intricacies and serpentine qualities of our legal system.”

Daily, he finds he “must sort through a tangle of fact, perception, and, yes, fiction (and) find within that thicket an answer that bears some semblance to justice and pays at least minimal homage to the truth.”

That Reynard and Valente share religious faith is evident throughout their observations about poetry, the common interest that led them to the same fork in the road.

Poetry is a frequent “springboard for prayer,” Reynard admits, and both poetry and prayer are essentials when the couple conduct workshops in the Cook County Juvenile Detention Center.

After one of those sessions for responsive young people charged with violent crimes, he says he “prayed that these troubled youngsters would experience the truly transcendent power of prayer and poetry.”

Reynard and Valente met as students in a 2002 poetry workshop and found mutual meaning in a poem, “Alive Together,” by Lisel Mueller. Shortly thereafter, they heard the poet in a Chicago reading, and that poem became their poem.

Although they have busy careers that often separate them, “neither Charley nor I could imagine a single day without the lifeblood of poetry,” Valente notes in her introduction to the book. “Poetry is not a hobby. It is part of our life's work.”

As Mueller might have been describing the crossroads of their lives, in “their poem”: “…the odds against us are endless, our chances of being alive together statistically nonexistent; still we have made it…”

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