Redemptions Refrain: Five Cycles from Play to Steady Grace (Redemptions Rhythms)

In Redemptions Refrain, D. Brandt brings his trilogy to its culminating arc, where the soul rises from descent into a long, steady answering of grace. These five cycles trace the slow rebuilding that follows deliverance—how mercy, once received, becomes a rhythm; how joy, once glimpsed, becomes a practice; and how faith, once bruised, begins to sing again.
Here the poems turn from collapse to resonance, from the inner ache to the outward echo of a life remade. Through crafted forms, patterned cadences, and the discipline of refrain, Brandt shows how renewal unfolds not in sudden triumph but in repeated returning—small fidelities, quiet recognitions, and the daily choosing of hope.
Where Deliverance revealed mercy in weakness, Refrain explores what comes after: the struggle to live upheld, to carry grace into ordinary days, and to let joy recalibrate the heart. These poems do not promise ease; they witness how the soul learns to trust its footing again.
Brandt offers readers a companion for the long obedience of restored life—a poetic witness to the God who not only delivers but sustains, shaping echoes of redemption into a refrain that continues long after the storm.

Douglas R. Brandt, Ph.D., is a poet and former scientist, manager, and consultant whose lifelong curiosity was sparked in a Kansas basement lab of his own making. That drive carried him to a Ph.D. in biochemistry from Kansas State University and decades researching and managing all types of projects--holding two patents and multiple scientific publications--until retirement in 2022 gave poetry the space it had long deserved.



Early poems did appear alongside the lab work, slipped into his high school's Non Pareil (1973) and a Christian youth magazine soon after, but poetry only fully claimed him later. His writing now marries formal craft (villanelles, quatrains, looping refrains) with a scientist's precision and a believer's honest grappling with suffering, hope, and redemption. The Redemptions Rhythms Trilogy--Redemptions, Deliverance, and Redemptions Refrain--traces that pattern across breadth, depth, and daily reach.



He lives in Lafayette, Indiana, with his wife Cheryl. Their four children, spouses, and four grandchildren are scattered from nearby to afar. He still runs barefoot and refuses easy answers.