Restless Messengers: Poems

Two things drew me to this poetry: the poet's understanding of the storyteller and his quoting of Bruno Schulz. An excellent example of his understanding of story is "The Piper at the Gates of Dawn". Its epitath is from Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows"; the poem explores the harsher reality of animals' lives while acknowledging their acceptance of their place in the universe. He uses the recurrent image of music - "absent music" or "music, seeming to have gone, glides through the reed on its sinuous way" - as the life-force of which the river animals feel a part.In "A Poem for Storytellers" he acknowledges that stories are all we have to change the world, but the story has been lost in transmission. In this poem, as well as several with distinctly Kabbalistic references, the power of the word, its margins, its hiddenness is explored. Occasionally, his vocabulary reaches beyond the "average reader" as in "A Poem for the Gret Heresy": "From provincial gaardens given to weeds, / matter pullulates, forgetful of the season, / enticed to emulate / divine emanations: / the extoplasmic furniture of junk."More frequently his language is that of a storyteller as in "Four Impromptus": "These are the goblins / who shadowed the old man, / leading him astray / as he walked in the forest."Story, faith, music, humility ... these are the themes of this well written poetry. While not among the "greats" of English poetry, this poet is worthy of the readers' time.