Earthly Freight

"There's certainly something to be said for the notion that poetry is-or can be-a kind of mathematics, with subject elements factored in rather than out. What you get is not computable, but not arguable either. Take these lines from Knowlton's "Central Park," touching on the simultaneous advents of spring and a brother's fatal cancer: ..".I saw that facts/were chaff, /that in perishing's lone distillery/exactitude drifts/like a petal..." They may not prove anything, but they are balancing life and death. That's a pretty powerful equation. And there are fifty-three more Knowlton poems in this truly impressive collection."
-Peter Kane Dufault, poet Looking in All Directions, Selected Poems 1954-2000,
To Be in the Same World, 2007, 1996 Norton Anthology