April 1, 1987
Jarrow¹
Would want to paint them, those town-bright boys at the dead end of the track where it coils down away from church and mound leaving almost an island, as it […]
April 1, 1987
Naming the Flowers
makes no difference to the flowers. These inside out parasols, orb webs on crooked needles, gray filmy cups in the clockwork of summer goatsbeard are to themselves not "seeds," not […]
April 1, 1987
Child
Child, what are you pointing at in this house? Why, without language, you are curious about some object that we cannot see, but towering for you out of the furniture […]
April 1, 1987
Poem
The sea and the library in this town are close together, the song of water and the hum of reading are related sounds and the rocks and books stand up […]
April 1, 1987
A Dying
I It is autumn and the pain is departing. The trees still stand though the leaves drop one by one outside a window which you hardly see for the kindly […]
April 1, 1987
Gifts
In medio ramos annosaque bracchia pandit Ulmus opaca ingens, quam sedem somnia volgo Vana tenere ferunt foliisque sub omnibus haerent. VIRGIL, Aeneid A sunk plot, in this city, of nurseries: […]
April 1, 1987
Let No Man Write My Epitaph
Just where the Seminole Trail sleaks south into Emmet StreetI came on a gunk motel that flips out this zeugma to the Scots, or the Scotch-Irish: SPEND A NIGHT, NOT […]
April 1, 1987
Belling the Cat
From Piers Plowman Rectors and parish priests complained to the bishop that their parishes were poor since the plague-time, they begged a license and leave to live in London where […]
April 1, 1987
‘Jig of the Week No. 21’
Under optimum conditions—the room quiet In fireglow, rain lashing on nocturnal glass— I start an old American puzzle. It smells like my Webster's Dictionary; It reminds me of the lesson […]
April 1, 1987
Lines at Barry
Morning light steely and sharp on the docks-water and beyond, outlining a ship in the gray Channel. At berth, one banana ship white against the old mill building where, you […]
April 1, 1987
The Last Candles
The final stage of our journey over we reached Odessa. So glorious a scene I think my eyes had never taken in— the harbor bristling with ships of all the […]
April 1, 1987
New British Poetry Introduction
Let me begin this introduction to my selection of recent work by a few of the British poets I admire by going back to the last time The Kenyon Review […]