"This poem joins the others in 'Brightword' in a dialectic of conservancy and severance. On one hand, the speaker is worried about the complexity and evolution of her young son’s heart condition. While, from a young age, he is obsessed with climate change and devoted to ocean conservation. As is often the case with kids, playtime in the physicality of the natural world gives way to stunning moments of perception."
"When I sit down to conjure a poem up, I’m sitting down with poets I’ve known, read, and heard, sitting down with what my grandma said last week and eight years ago, I’m sitting down with the news and my friends and my neighbors whose mere existence sneaks its way into the poems without me looking."
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“For me, Virgil’s Aeneid is partly about continuity and repetition, a setting out over and over again. Likewise, David Ferry’s deep intertextual approach to writing—especially in Bewilderment, which includes his translations of Virgil, Catullus, and others, alongside his original poems—is also about continuity and iteration."
