An obvious intellectual, and an academic one too, his work is the result of a speculative mind with no sense of humour, like someone who has swallowed Wittgenstein without reading him. The author is describing looking at a photograph that shows what he sees in the first two lines. What he describes in the next two is just pointless speculation. His long, unrhymed quatrains that appear to constitute his formal trademark, achieve a level of uninterest akin to the common experience of viewing other people s holiday snaps. Life is created, not given.
Birth is something else.
Sometimes merely another word. But its covers are more interesting and vibrant, less conventional. And in Charles Wright American Pulitzer Prize winner it has quite a superior poet, certainly in outlook, craft and sensitivity to Kuppner. We measure the silence. We measure the emptiness.