POET'S CHOICE

Only, here and there, an old sailor,

Drunk and asleep in his boots,

Catches tigers

In red weather.

The poem is clear, though a certain kind of classroom experience may interfere with that. Possibly readers in 1923 were better able to appreciate this poem than some of today's readers, who may be over-anxious to interpret and analyze its celebration of the unexpected and the extraordinary. The imagination of the poet, like the dreams of the drunken sailor, exults in weather that is "red."

That adjective -- "red," suggesting vividness, risk, surprise, passion, even violence -- may be one of the links in a striking new book of poems by Meghan O'Rourke, Halflife, that reminded me of Stevens's energy. Here is O'Rourke's poem "Hunt," with images that in a similar way are familiar, yet disrupt trite expectations. Her shade of red, associated with the fox, is different from the red of Stevens's poem, and her emotional weather is quite different, too. Her poem involves a process, rather than a time of day:

HUNT

The light of the mind is red. It is a red street,

it never ends, it must be kept to

like a schedule. When it is fine, it is fine,

and the night's hounds flinch from it.

Foxes run under dark cover of leaves;

the glacier, trapping everything unused, melts.