Great Regulars: When, toward the end of "Windcatcher,"

one reads that "poetry completes/what history leaves out," one is tempted to rewrite that last line as "what history erases." For in his prison memoir, "The True Confessions of an Albino Terrorist," [Breyten] Breytenbach writes that the purpose of his interrogators was "to burgle and to burn down the storehouse of dreams and fantasies and hopes."

from David Kirby: The New York Times: Needing No Weatherman

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This is one of those poems you're afraid to look at again for fear it might be less beautiful than you thought.

Of all the things that populate the world, then, both human and non-, a poem has the greatest potential to succeed or fail, which is why Pinsky can comfortably offer a piece called "Poems with Lines in Any Order" or observe, again in "Immature Song," that poems are adolescents, "confused, awkward, self-preoccupied, vaguely//Rebellious in a way that lacks practical focus, moving without/Discipline from thing to thing."

from David Kirby: The Washington Post: Soulful Sounds

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