The talented voices presented in this issue’s poetry selections range from removed observers to troubled philosophers. Whether preoccupied with the beautiful woman at the park or the ‘purple irises/rioting along the cracked wall of an asylum,’ alabaster horses or ‘the innerness that collapses in beauty,’ these poets all seem to be reckoning with the intersection between physical and metaphysical things. Where one poet endeavors to trap God in the poignancy of dusk, drawing the divine out of the ‘lush decay of light,’ another poet denies the presence of the god in what is good, saying instead that ‘the good is without a god…it is a part of itself and a partaker only of its love for what it is a part.’
The poets presented in this issue pose questions too big to answer in the succinctness of a single poem. What they offer, instead, are tentative conjectures toward the posing of still larger questions. Even ‘Sunshine,’ a prose poem written in a question and answer format, does not so much offer answers as it explodes the inquirer’s humbly worded questions into grandiloquent queries. The opening remark – ‘So what was it like?’ – is frank enough in appearance but as the poem begins to answer itself we are left wondering what the ‘it’ of the poet’s experience is, such that she could compare it, in her melodramatic response, to ‘waking up beneath a dead sun.’
In addition to the collisions between physical and metaphysical, question and conjecture, the reader will also notice an autumnal and even wintry tinge in some of these poems. One poem remembers how ‘Fall spread across the land like sand in breeze’; another how a moth, carrying winter in its burning wings, ‘Died as it flared against the glass/Seeped in ashes.’ These poets’ morose invitation to join them in the phenomenal experience of the colder seasons is, somehow, a welcome one. It suggests that to be initiated into the liveliness of being we must also pass out of being, into its dreary and even deader underside.
The poems presented in this issue at times complement and at times contradict one another. Yet if we were to extract one common truth from them, it would be this: what endures is not the logical cogency of argument but the poetic coherency of passion.