Writing in the Still

This haunting opening poem, which through eight sections situates its reader in the aftermath of a spectral memory, does not immediately suggest a place so much as the allusive echo of a choir of departed angels. The scene-historic in Walter Benjamin's sense of accumulated ruin-gives voice to such questions and recollections, "singing there in the instant," a still voice that patently inhabits discrete moments of silence. The seventh section, "That Angel should with Angel war," expands on a baffling instance where Milton's Angel Raphael recalls two armies lined up one against the other. The allusion sees the Angel Michael wielding a sword hewn in God's armoury, using Satan's body as his target, while steeling himself to land a blow that will not need repeating. With a downward stroke he slices Satan's sword in two and in the returning cycle sheers the now fallen Angel almost in half. The reader's incredulous supposition, even before the ethereal substance sutures the evaporating wound, leaving the angel humbled by the memory of pain for the first time, is that this must be poetic spectacle, a staging of epic excess.