REASONS FOR MOVING

A number of the poems in this second collection have appeared in magazines such as the Atlantic Monthly and the New Yorker. They are extremely simple, almost child-like, poems, unthymed and brief. They are written in flat, declarative sentences. Their Reasons for Moving are an equally childlike, simple sense of horror; of a pursuing, underlying nightmare too obvious to be disbelieved or escaped. (""It is autumn. People are jumping from jetliner Their relatives leap into the ai to join them."" Or, more urgently: ""Let us save the babies./... Their dreams/are infecting them./ ... Their leader sits in a bullet-proof car and applauds."") This sense of a complicated doom, expressed at the most primitive level, gives these poems many overtones and echoes. Logic, reality, judgment are unimportant; the unease and inchoate terror aroused in them predate such daylight mental protections. They are part of pre-history, childhood, and contemporary everyday life.