In Only So Far, Cording's poetry vacillates between complaint and praise, lamenting and loving our "sowre-sweet dayes" as George Herbert's poem "Bittersweet" puts it. Behind the book lies the story of the Promised Land that Moses never quite reaches, and those "little daily miracles" that Virginia Woolf says stand in as a kind of recompense for the "great revelation" that never does come. Poets and poetry readers will embrace Cording's eighth book of poems. His work is of interest to librarians and ministers in seminary programs.