Category Archives: Essays in Criticism

What makes a small poem memorable? This question has fascinated me for many years. I’ve come to the conclusion that even the smallest poems – haiku – connect us with the mysterious life we otherwise can’t name. (We need more … Continue reading →

A few minutes ago, I stepped onto the deck of the house. From there I could see and hear the water, and everything that’s happened to me all these years. It was hot and still. The tide was out. No … Continue reading →

All winter your brute shoulders strained against collars, padding and steerhide over the ash hames, to haul sledges of cordwood for drying through spring and summer, for the Glenwood stove next winter, and for the simmering range. In April you … Continue reading →

This is the second in a series of essays on the poems in Chard deNiord’s book The Double Truth. The essays explore the space between philosophy and poetry in these extraordinarily rich poems. Far from depending on the default mode … Continue reading →

Root Power glides in the root, drinking rain, living in the earth, and its fantasy is white snow. It rises and breaks through the soil, it crawls along secretly. Its arm is like rope. On the root’s arm a worm … Continue reading →

Mary Oliver’s “Wild Geese” is a very popular poem. When read closely by a group of people (as happened at The Sheafe Street Books Poetry Collective, Portsmouth, NH, on two evenings in January), the poem yields quite a range of … Continue reading →

The visible in the invisible; the invisible in the visible. The old aesthetic chestnut comes alive when applied to haiku. the cool breeze crooked and meandering it comes to me Issa (trans. Blyth) Nothing could be more immediate than a … Continue reading →

PRIMARY WONDER Days pass when I forget the mystery. Problems insoluble and problems offering their own ignored solutions jostle for my attention, they crowd its antechamber along with a host of diversions, wearing their colored clothes; cap and bells. And … Continue reading →

Emblem, by Richard Hoffman. Barrow Street Press, 85 pages, $16.95 I have known Richard Hoffman for a long time. I’ve always enjoyed his books, prose and poetry. His memoir Half the House is so good it hurts, and I’ve known … Continue reading →

January 27 Frosty day. A winter sun. White breath. But on this Friday we didn’t know what to celebrate and what to mourn – it was Holocaust Memorial Day and Mozart’s Birthday. Our memory was perplexed. Our imagination lost its … Continue reading →