Let me say a few words about each. Set in the downtown Guggenheim Museum, the poem offers a voyeuristic glimpse through the momentarily open door of the ladies' room which is ironically located between two paintings on full display but clearly of less interest to the speaker than the swing of this intriguing door. It is a poem that lifts us above the ordinary observation of its opening to a philosophical vantage point from which a stirring insight is delivered, but not without th semi- comic hesitations of dashes and parentheses. Late November , the second prize winner, performs an act of verbal hypnosis on its reader. The repetitions of smoke whether rising from an outdoor fire, a kitchen, or a pipe create a pattern within the poem's five octaves that draws us inside the landscape of the poem and its speaker's discrete sensibility.
Smoke actually seems to drift through the lines of the poem.
The poem begins in sensuous pleasure and then veers off to consider one war safely locked in the historical past and another war threatening to erupt into the present. When I was in the final stages and had to now single out one poem, I attached myself to the Portrait of a Woman with Her Marker because it attached itself to me so forcefully. It was one of those poems that gets into your system immediately, and for days after reading it, it would visit me while driving or walking across campus. Among the poem's many attractions, I loved the way it mixes the comic and the deadly serious and finds a perfect balance there between elegy and farce. The poem changes gears so smoothly from the almost vaudevillian opening with its jaunty Irish cadence to a roll call of the dead, which cleverly uses the ethnically ambiguous name of Costello to modulate from Irish names to Italian names on the markers in a cemetery.