With roots in a tradition perfected by the Japanese as well as the Western Canon of love poetry,
and flowering in the form of concise, imagistic verse, Baldwin’s latest poems are poems of love,
poems of love gone wrong, and poems of tender endearment, as here:
First winter, then summer,
and in the long spring between,
you move as only music moves,
all about the air—
“Like the ‘pillow talk’ of the 10th century Sei Sonagon, the voice here is intimate and quiet.
These little poems of longing are relief from the portentous noise of much contemporary poetry.
Instead, we ‘follow the brush’ (hence: zuihitsu) of a mind retracing the events of an affair.”
—John Balaban, author of Locusts at the Edge of Summer, and Spring Essence: The Poetry of Ho Xuan Huong
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