To Sing Like the Hermit Thrush

The poems in To Sing Like The Hermit Thrush are about loss, about realizing how little control we have over our destinies, about death and about the defeat of love. Themes of loss, alienation, stasis, fear, and anger; repeated images such as threatening landscapes ("I study the clouds for a face, / a face like the killer inside, / the one we use on each other") and death scenes ( "we die with every breath / this horrible beauty exacts"); frequent use of city landscapes ("I've been in the city so long/ even birds, children/ sound like small machines"); and a persistent battered and meditative voice unify the poems. Some of the poems seem pessimistic, others deal with inertia while a few make tentative attempts to affirm our humanness, as if some­ thing might be learned after the body is carried away. The predominant themes of this collection are death and failed love. Many of the encounters take place in memory, dreams, or fantasy. From their everyday experiences to their nightmares and daydreams, the connections and communication between the characters of these poems become frayed or torn. The speaker tries to trace the breakdown, to glimpse images of life together, often going back to childhood. There is also a background of violence. Even when there is a sense that something beneficial will occur, it becomes clear that the speaker will pay dearly for the advantage. Where pleasure shows itself, there is pain; where beauty emerges, there is simultaneously an ugliness that the speaker must face. I hope that con­ fronting the world's black deeds, the speaker can come away with new knowledge, a knowledge possible only through the exacting art of making poems.