Mandelstam - his gift and the untamable nature of it - was like a thorn in Stalin's brain.

God is with us, not beyond us, in suffering.

I can't think offhand of any American poets who have Mandelstam's urgency, but it's a different country and a different time, and I don't think it would make much sense to say that this is something that's "missing" from contemporary American poetry.

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.

Mandelstam's style is not singular. He could be stately and traditional, ribald and funny, hectic, elegiac. He could handle abstractions and ideas as well as Pope or Browning but then be so musical that other poems approach pure sound.

Sometimes God calls a person to unbelief in order that faith may take new forms.