Barely There

The flashy poets and the poets with a schtick get the big audience, but it is the quiet poets whose individual poems more often linger with me. I'd trade all of Ginsberg, say, for William Bronk's six-line poem ""After Bach,"" which derives from the cello suites the lesson that sadness ""can be in part /to accept the absence of One to say it to."" And it is Bronk whose work is called to mind for me by Yahia Lababidi's Barely There, in which ""in embracing, we let go.""'
-- H. L. Hix, Author of First Fire, Then Birds