A poem is a private story, after all, no matter how apparently public. The reader is always overhearing a confession.

The primary function of the creative use of language - in our age - is to try to constantly restore words to their meanings, to keep the living tissue of responsibility alive.

There are moments in our lives which, threaded, give us heaven—

These are crystalline - oftentimes incandescent - translations of Juarroz's powerful metaphysical poems where eternity and silence jut up against a world where “writing infects the landscape” and there are “more letters than leaves” - The kind of match one hopes for where both the translator and the poet are in luck; new poems which don't leak and yet old poems in which the original passion shines.

Water is a miracle - it takes so many forms - is the core of life - is holy. So it becomes important to pay utmost attention to the holiness which is this planet's life - blood, which we are destroying. I always look for it in a poem. I honor it. I pay it mind.

The storm: I close my eyes and, standing in it, try to make it mine.

If there is anything I love most, in the poems I love, it is the audible braiding of that bravery, that essential empty-handedness, and that willingness to be taken by surprise, all in one voice.