Letters

Poetry. 63 sonnet-sized letters, confined to various forms of 14 lines each, but certainly not limited by the confines of any traditional notion of the sonnet. Ranging in size from terse verses with three-word lines to run-on sentences whose long lines spill over the confines of the margins, these poems track my news, all the words left behind/in the silence of the pictures/where I would have music instead (from 1) and manage, delightufully, to earnestly engage the legacy of frustrated initiative complicated by the inclination/to gather and reshape what at first seemed only a series of mere formalities/into expressions of low key exasperation and contentious irony (from 25). Di Palma creates an enticing, intelligent interior world, and leaves us in the unproven place on the road or at the table/on the other side of the wall painted with a dragon (from 63)-in other words, he leaves us still moving, not to a point but to a direction/conversant with its circumstance (from 24).