Jan Steckel

Despite having to rush off today, we have to make sure to feature Jan Steckel's great poem "Behind the Palisades" in LavenderReview, issue 1: Sappho, from 2010. The beginning and ending are superb, you rarely see this kind of great work. What an excellent control of language; all the layers here are amazing and intricate like Borges' work.

Here's an excerpt:

A Spanish hummingbird and I
staggered laughing over the cobblestones
clutching cut-glass cordial glasses of anisette
in Oxford May Day three in the morning.
Taste took me back twelve years
to a California canyon, filled with ferns.
How I chewed licorice in the green spray
of forbidden fennel for the first time,
[...]

For home was a
hollow of hurt burned worse than an iron,
and I ventured to England, to France and to Spain,
to stay away from that plain pain.