Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop and the 'great might have been'

From house to house he treks, and inn to inn, the feral dogs

How to approach—I mean adequately approach—the devastating reality of Ground Zero from Ground Zero? What happens to perception, history, language, syntax and grammar—to say nothing of lungs, flesh and brain—at that level as the second airliner rips into the swaying tower fill

Nebuchadnezzar stared while the prophet blazed.

Above the bluebleak priest the brightblue fisher hovers.

I met James Torrens S J for the first and only time sometime in the mid-1990 rsquo s in August at the Bread Loaf Writers Conference in Vermont He was an editor then at America living in mid-town Manhattan in the years before I myself became the poetry editor there and I was eager to meet hi

It is easy to overlook Joseph, much as we overlook those millions of men and women who do their work quietly and well, without the least fanfare.