Poems of Lee Bassett, 1973-2000

Some say sparrows are stories;/ They return in the brain and change/ With the telling,/ When the facts get grim./ Some suggest that after death,/ Birds quietly enter our bloodstream/ And make us want to travel./ from Lucy and the Blue Quail Here are small, beautifully continuous sequences of poems, a big poetry of sharp focus, of tracts of darkness, a poetry of constellations, constantly in transformation. Bassett does not try to hold his poems down in one place; he pushes them out to keep in touch with the sensuous, primitive, initial rhythms of our lives. Meanings wobble, grow, burst, shift as we read. That is the music of passion and loneliness, of the frightening intensity of a love which anchors the whole book, in an almost religious mystery. It is important to point out that the poems themselves move by touch, by feel, as though nothing else is possible. The attempt is not the elimination of suffering, but rather the correct means of welcoming it quietly. Cover painting "Poetry Reading" by Milton Avery Ink drawings by Ed Cain