William Greenway

One poet I noticed was William Greenway, who had a piece called "Optimist" in Thrush Poetry's March 2013 issue here, which had an excellent ending:
[...]
shimmering in desert heat, 
maybe some palms
heavy with the dark eyes
of dates, lipping
a little water.


Then I found his excellent poem "Reunion" in his volume "Where We've Been", which has a great opening. Now, my taste tends towards the classic poems and also towards the overwroughtness of say Pound, but Greenway is a good example of how you can have clean, beautiful simplicity in a piece and yet put it in a little Modernist or meta style.

It works even better against a poem with cleaner lines than most. Here's the opening from here [scroll down]:


It's New Orleans but it isn't. 
There's no heat, no black mud levee 
just cool jade grass declining 
to the clear Mississippi, cobalt 
blue flowing so shallow over sand 
that we can wade across. 
And trees everywhere, but no houses 
only small grocery stores in the groves 
of water oak, in the shade of Spanish moss  [...]

He has another excellent piece in "New Orleans, 1983", and I'm going to quote the whole first stanza because it's that good:

I've been there. In another room a woman
laughs, but the lime-green
fields are rice, the black clouds
monsoons coming across the Bay
of Bengal whipping orange
saris along the plain of beach, a
temple ruined in jade, vines
strung with red monkeys, stones
of steps going down into
the brown Ganges, white cattle
in the streets, golden curry, woman's
violet lips, that forehead spot, third eye. [...]