Left Wing of a Bird
“The sounds, the strategies, the huge presence—I can’t praise them enough. As far as his final gift to us, it is found, I feel, in his direct moral presence and here he abandons a little his O’Hara and his Donne. He doesn’t bespeak the Ten Commandments, nor Solon’s code, nor Hammurabi’s, but by direction and indirection he creates a verbal framework, a poetic tablet, the way a poet can, and if he’s brave enough, does.” --Gerald Stern, The Iowa Review, Vol.35, No.2, Fall 2005