My favorites are "Thou Art That," "Girlfriend, Deconstructed," and especially "Food For The Exorcist," and double-especially "Putting On The Muse."

I like your sentences, because they are just that--sentences--and skillfully so. As I am sure you have noticed, syntax and grammar don't go without saying in current poesy. In fact, there seems to be a statute against such: a disguised crutch to wedge under the armpit of those who either simply can't get a predicate and a subject within a mile of one another, let alone a subordinate clause, or who have delved just deep enough into English composition to realize it takes conscious work, beyond just the emotive grunting that "poetry" has degenerated into among so many camps. I have actually been in the presence of someone who argued that a turd is the perfect villanelle.

Your narrative and exposition flow, like your sentences, not only naturally, but sensically. You are saying things (there was a time when it would seem odd to congratulate a writer for that). You're expositing and organizing and presenting in ways meaningful not only in the emotional sense, but the logical. This, too, is a no-no, in academic as well as street poetastery, a sanction of convenience, disguised as postmodernism, but merely circumventing sloth and incapacity, and the lack of something to say.

It sounds strange, but one of the best things I can say about some poetry is that it would work fine formatted as prose. In other words, the poet has not fallen back on the crutch of verse to camouflage ineptness. This is not always the case, of course--plenty of wonderful twentieth- and twenty-first century stuff relies for its very existence upon the control exerted by the poet on the right-hand, and even the left-hand margin. But your kind of poetry (and mine, too, for sure, such as I am making for our book) would be readable and sensible if all the hard returns were removed except for those delineating paragraphs. To read poems like ours is tonic for anyone sickened with current verse rot.

So it's possible to ponder your poems as narrations--and it's here I see why you have chosen verse. This layout, not so much metrical as sensical, allows you to characterize and exposit with extreme efficiency, and give us an entire meeting, seduction and heartbreak in a much shorter space than a prose story would. I find it delightful, because this method sweeps one along with utter facility. I find myself assuming these works to have been written as effortlessly as respiration.

A perfect example is in "Food For the Exorcist," the paragraph/stanza where you lay out, in a mere ten lines, an extensive, penetrating, and completely vivid encapsulation of "late-seventies middle-class America."

"Putting on the Muse" has all these qualities, but is my favorite of all because, as Shakespeare did in the itinerant players scene in Hamlet, you have written about your art. I find the stanzas that begin with these lines--

>>We went to the museum where we ate a seven-course meal with Rubens

>>And the museum was no longer a place of ancestral communion.

--not only effective within the love story, but quite moving, almost as set pieces, expressing one particular artist's sense of himself and his work within the history of art. You have, with the effortlessness that can only come from profound knowledge of the subject, interwoven the personal lives of your great painterly predecessors with their work. It's funny and sad and brilliant.

Of course, in addition to these formal excellencies, your imagery, on the level of the language itself, is bright and vivid. It's fascinating to look at your pictures in the context of these poems, and see where one side of your imagination blends into the other.

Your psychology of certain types of carnal heterosex never fails, in each poem, to subvert expectations, like a snake doing a U-turn on itself at the last minute and sinking the pleasurable fangs in. I think a large part of the effectiveness here is the narrative voice you have developed, pleasantly self-effacing, nonjudgmental except where warranted, yet sharp-eyed as--well, as the astonishing draftsman you are!

All in all, these are very pleasurable, fine poems, David!

Tom