Larry Kearney's work has from its beginning taken on the most commonly unnoticed phenomenal presence on the set: harm. Good and evil are human trivialities. Harm is the Allshadow. To my way of thinking, Kearney and Jack Spicer, two noble kinsmen, stand alone among anglomundo poets in this regard, having noticed and thereby understood what was being asked of them. Larry Kearney never wavers in his quest to understand the sapphires in the mud, or the import in each human footstep. His typical poem is very short, very long, brashly assertive and searchingly sotto voce, and over the years he has produced a corpus of irreplaceable poetry in which "time stops for minds."