Diminutive Revolutions, Daniel Bouchard
subpress, 1999

Poetry as salvaging -- recovering a sense of place -- acknowledging the multiple layers of world and perception you find yourself in the midst of.

Wrackline, the information about life contained in garbage -- poet as gleaner

Almost Buddhist (Basho?) evenness of attention and affect across the layers of the world

Mosses and lichens

in the woods of Wellfleet



Recreate prudently, the president advises

and the motors hum far off the coast



A summer to write about 



In the closet of the cottage

a tiny toad hides

under a laundry pile.

We capture

to release it outside.

Scanning the street and the horizon with a attentiveness and a poetic pleasure which makes occasional forays into crankiness on one side, and rapture on the other.

A poetic capacity for listening. Listening to the way the elements of the natural world, which after all, include all of the man-made world, its technology. history and poisons, interact. Listening to the simultaneous emerging patterns of public and private life across time.

A certain affinity with ecosystem, including alarm at the egregious human chemical and political imbalances.

the world is on fire     fire sold separately

A gentle kaleidoscope of perceptions and recognitions used as musical intervals.

life must be at least as well lived as fantasy.