Crossing

The poems in Crossing search for the ineffable and numinous on Earth—in objects, current and historical events, natural and psychological phenomena, and in particular personae, real or imagined. This work comes from a deep nostalgia for both the past and present. Elements such as slant rhyme and refrain play a heavy role in these poems. Refrain, particularly, acts as a kind of engine for the poems, perhaps because I am so influenced by music and its mechanisms. The first section reflects these interests; the poems experiment with sound and musicality. The main experiment in these poems is the elimination of particular vowels. The question arises: can words sing without their vowels? Many of the poems in Crossing address the visual arts and music, looking for harmonic linkages between literature, painting, sculpture, music, and dance. For example, one of the long poems, “Numbers,” is partly inspired by the book and documentary The Rape of Europa, which concerns the art that was looted and lost during World War II. In a sense, the poems want to “find” lost things, to dwell in what has gone missing