Poet David Rigsbee's The Red Tower: New and Selected Poems was just published this month by NewSouth Books, and his new collection, The Pilot House, will be published by Black Lawrence Press in December.

Stacked stone holds its cutout against the blue.
Old window arches are bricked, having
been first covered with concrete
and that slagged off. Swallows loop
from cracks to air and back, and pigeons
perched like gargoyles gently into sleepy,
perishable sentries.

Poetry of a higher order courts two kinds of difficulty. The first is formal, connected with the degrees of ellipsis, or leaving out, that a poem can sustain and still be subject to understanding.

Readers will be pleased at the sheer size of Kizer’s Cool, Calm, and Collected Poems. After all, we are accustomed to equate care with parsimony. At 400 pages, it will appear that parsimony was not her vice, while care has ever been a virtue.

Cloud and earth converge like banners of geese,
both undulant, assimilable
each to the other.