[A. E. Stallings]

Perhaps he's been featured before, I don't recall. His poems have come up occasionally on other topics ("Anonymous Drawing" in the Ekphrastic thread). Anyway, a master of verse formal and free, with a number of experiments in between.

Here is one of the more widely anthologized:

Men at Forty

Men at forty
Learn to close softly
The doors to rooms they will not be
Coming back to.

At rest on a stair landing,
They feel it moving
Beneath them now like the deck of a ship,
Though the swell is gentle.

And deep in mirrors
They rediscover
The face of the boy as he practices tying
His father's tie there in secret,

And the face of that father,
Still warm with the mystery of lather.
They are more fathers than sons themselves now.
Something is filling them, something

That is like the twilight sound
Of the crickets, immense,
Filling the woods at the foot of the slope
Behind their mortgaged houses.

At first read, straightforward free verse, a moving, melancholy little poem. But closer inspection yields some other patterns. The first and second line of each quatrain rhyme after a fashion on the falling syllable--with the exception of the last, where the monosyllable "sound" assonates with houses (though perhaps the connection is with immense and houses, sound and slope). The third line of each quatrain expands and the fourth retracts again. All of this adds to a sense of tightness and control in what is essentially (unless I am missing something!) free verse. Every word counts, and we feel the weight of "mort" in mortgaged.