be in the physical universe, with its always individual near-at-hand do-
ings and beings, human and otherwise; the whole show shading off into
immensity and vagueness, and (however splendid or frightful or dull or,
ultimately, unimaginably strange) with its bare unrelenting factuality hur-
tling along impassively as it does, in a kind of fi nal dignity. Some sense
of this preceded by a long time the writing of the poems, I suppose, and
has something to do with their unreconstructed realism and particularity.
and not meditative descriptions.
contribution to the ensemble: what counts for me in any collection is less
the individual poem than the individual life, fi nding its way somehow,
anyhow, directly and otherwise, into the whole work....