Regarding "April 5, 1974"...I kidded Wilbur once that he should have gone right ahead and said "frost" instead of "feeze." Of course he preferred the indirection.
"Boy in the Window" doesn't just skirt sentimentality, it plunges right in and romps, with melodrama in its first stanza, personification in its second. Then there's the ending, and the steel of irony, which has only whispered in the sheath, is drawn halfway out. "So much fear." But whose fear? Suddenly the reader can invert everything and wonder whether the snowman is in fact a stand-in for a child who holds too much apart, and whose parents fear for him.
Thanks for posting these.
Alan Sullivan
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