Invisible Marches

Poetry. "Marches are borderlands, danger terrains, full of beasts or enemies or disappointed friends seeking exile. Marches are long lines, footsore soldiers stepping briskly with their minds on something else, thirty miles a day through the borderlands into conflict zones. Marches are times of years when once upon a time snow was rare and lions slept and the Passover lamb nibbled dandelions, clover, newborn grasses. In his lucid and articulate dreams, the poet talks us almost safely, slowly through the never-relenting parades, lingers in the groves, chatting up the spirits that appear. Cities are full of spirits, cities in the borderlands especially, not just Detroit or El Paso--Catskill and Boston are by the borderlands too. Because the border is always close. We feel all night the wind coming across the border, blasting us with terrors and sexual imagery. We live by the border, every dawn a glorious danger we belong to. But we seldom get to see the border so clearly until now, the invisible made visible, palpable, in Tamas Panitz's structured odes--the hidden world suddenly sung into sight."--Robert Kelly