Poetry has its uses for despair. It can carve a shape in which a pain can seem to be; it can give one’s loss a form and dimension so that it might be loss and not simply a hopeless haunting. It can do these things for one person, or it can do them for an entire culture. But poetry is for psychological, spiritual, or emotional pain. For physical pain it is, like everything but drugs, useless.

I'm drawn to this range, that's for sure, but I suppose the thing that most appeals to me about Mandelstam is the sense you get from every poem that everything - the poet's very soul - is at stake.

It's just that different emotions and perceptions demand different frequencies and intensities.

Wonder is the precondition for all wisdom.

I honestly don’t know whether I am describing something essential about the way we know God or merely my own weakness of mind.

We should be suspicious when God's call conforms so neatly to our own inclinations.

Nature poets can't walk across the backyard without tripping over an epiphany.