Another poem I'd like to highlight is Matthew James Babcock's "The Transient Rains of April Thirteenth" in the journal Pank here, issue 4.08, August 2009. He also has an interesting piece in Rattle #19, summer 2003 here, called "Passage".
The opening of "The Transient Rains of April Thirteenth" morphs into this beautiful, strange picture that seems eerie and filled with cool air, and the end is even better. The middle has a great line I really love; there's this Greek tinge, this dormant Apollonian/Dionysian edge to the whole poem that I love:
[...] I walked away,
having learned something I would realize the day I stood outside for the first time
with our
newborn son to taste the glorious rain-gusts of spring: the faces of horror and
ecstasy
are the same face.
He has a great sense of description, and can equal Heaney in his best lines--I love these especially, it has this terrible secret sense of things going on behind the scenes, like in Hughes:
Twenty below. Chestnut trees, stripped of their torches, hardened in the fragile air.
Crabapples
blackened satchels of shriveled fruit. One hundred and one crows whetted their
feathers on the bloodless sky.
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