The real mystery is this strange need. Why can't we just hide it and shut up? Why do we have to blab? Why do human beings need to confess?

In the pit of red You hid from the bone-clinic whiteness But the jewel you lost was blue.

The inmost spirit of poetry, in other words, is at bottom, in every recorded case, the voice of pain – and the physical body, so to speak, of poetry, is the treatment by which the poet tries to reconcile that pain with the world.

As Popa penetrates deeper into his life, with book after book, it begins to look like a Universe passing through a Universe. It is one of the most exciting things in modern poetry, to watch this journey being made.

There is no better way to know us Than as two wolves, come separately to a wood.

Show him every dawn & read to him endlessly.

And as if reporting some felony to the police they let you know you were not John Donne.