Because the Light Will Not Forgive Me: Essays from a Poet

Poet Griffin (This Is What the Desert Surrenders) ranges widely over topics from the nature of poetry to the beauty and challenges of the Great Basin’s vast, expansive landscape in this reflective collection of previously published essays. Likening himself to Thoreau in the desert in one essay (“Walden Pond in the Desert”), Griffin discovers that his view of poetry is “rooted in engagement with the outside world, the one beyond my window.” Pondering the attraction of the art form, Griffin declares that a “poem moves over things we cannot see, it precedes voice; it is silence presaging sound... In its plainest, undressed form, the poem is passion.” He offers appreciations of poets, recalling his encounters with them and their impact on his own work. He notes that Carolyn Kizer, for example, had a devouring mind and read widely, and could be a fierce critic because she was always precise in her comments. At the center of the collection are two essays on Hayden Carruth, whose “literature encompassed the whole of his humanity” and whose “values brought forth a skepticism of the Modernist belief in poetry of the imagined world.” Griffin’s lyrical essays reveal the complexities and spirit of poets and poems. (June)