The Magnificence of Ruin

Poetry. "Not since Emily Dickinson, and William Bronk (Sherry Kearns' beloved friend and mentor) has a poet brought so much gnomic utterance and cognitive lyricism to the page. Through the gift of her eyes' thought the nature of reality, or our experience of it, is made the clearer, brought the nearer, even in the moment of ruin (being actually the moment of revelation, where the difference between perception and cognition disappears). In the miraculous instant made apparent, we are brought as witness to a world where 'time's exchange / with infinity thrusts / its white lights / outward / pushing the dark / ahead of itself.', and our human constructions, enormous though they be to us, are revealed as the child's toyed-with-blocks that they are—under gravity's pull (or in their beholding, held there under gravity's spell)—'lean in suspension / of belief', and what falls falls as 'quarried giants, into / uncreated chaos', or more gently like 'This: the white lilacs / and of snow / falling in auras / through halos / of streetlamp light / filling roads and / sidewalks as if / stars' numberless markers were / filling night's faceless clock.'"—Robert Murphy