Zachary Schomburg

I really like thick, wide poems if they're done well--but it's difficult. They're much different and longer than a typical piece. Zachary Schomburg's "The Fire Cycle" is one I like. It was in Alice Blue Review issue seven here. 

Schomburg seems to write as if painting words in a Degas painting. And yet there is an element of Sappho in his work, something that Amy Lowell and H.D. went for as well. There's a sense of finality, of bedrock and reality underneath it all, unlike the more pastoral, neo-classical Imagist front--it's like a modern take on Modernism.

It has a very focus and repeat opening and evolves in a great way. I like the opening:

There are trees and they are on fire. There are hummingbirds and they 
are on fire. There are graves and they are on fire and the things coming 
out of the graves are on fire. The house you grew up in is on fire. There 
is a gigantic trebuchet on fire on the edge of a crater [...]

And the end is great; I like the combination of the personal, the private and the elemental:

[...]           There is our house burning like a star on the hill. There is 
our dark flickering shadow. There is my hand on fire in your hand on 
fire, my body on fire above your body on fire. There are tongues of ash. 
There are rocks on a private and distant uninhabitable planet. There is 
our whole life ahead of us.