Reader,
Shoould that be "Santa Ysabel" in the San Diego back country? I am a native San Diegan, and have an artist/architect/writer freind out there named James Hubbel.
Anyway, in my opinion the best of Everson is almost wholly concrete. See "Canticle to the Waterbirds", for example. From memory:
Clack your beaks,
you cormorants and kittiwakes,
north on those rock-croppings finger-jutted
into the rough Pacific surge...
...terns and pelicans,
you migratory pipers
and you shore-long gulls,
all you keepers of the coastline
north of here to the Mendocino beaches...
...break wide your harsh and salt-encrusted beaks
unmade for song,
and say a praise up to the Lord...
...for God has given you the imponderable grace
to <u>be</u> our verification...
...that you,
our lessers in the rich hegemony of being,
may serve as testament
to what a creature is,
and what creation owes...
Not sure about the line breaks, it's free verse, but these are some remembered quotes. For a spiritual poet, a religious one, I've always found Everson (Brother Antoninus) remarkably concrete.
Murphy is correct, if you want to see a "great" poet who deals almost wholly in abstraction, read Wallace Stevens :
Anecdote of the Jar
I placed a jar in Tennessee,
And round it was, upon a hill.
It made the slovenly wilderness
Surround that hill.
The wilderness rose up to it,
And sprawled around, no longer wild.
The jar was round upon the ground
And tall and of a port in air.
It took dominion every where.
The jar was gray and bare.
It did not give of bird or bush,
Like nothing else in Tennessee.
(robt)
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