Poetic Obituaries: [Donald] Finkel's work could be mordantly comic

and was often of epic length; a single poem could fill an entire volume. There was little high-flown abstraction in his poetry, and little lofty diction. Writing in colloquial free verse and butting normally disparate subjects against each other, he deliberately blurred the boundaries between the animate and inanimate, the mythic and the mundane, the sacred and the profane.

The title poem of "Not So the Chairs" opens this way:

The tables slept on their feet

like horses

from The New York Times: Donald Finkel, 79, Poet of Free-Ranging Styles, Is Dead

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