Poet's Choice
By Robert Pinsky
Sunday, September 2, 2007; Page BW12
James Hoch's poems approach subjects such as grief, loss and violation in a way that feels freshly inspired by reality. For example, instead of resorting to the literary or cinematic clich?s of a deathbed scene, he manages to express the limited but distinct good of pain-killing medication: that island of practical comfort, surrounded by dread and sorrow, of common experience:
Morphine
The man lying in bed is dying
from cancer, flecks of bone
flow like ice in his blood.
Outside it's snowing,
lightly in the street, white petals
from a pear tree.
Everything is starting
to feel immense. His children,
like four pylons,
quietly resemble each other.
They pull at glasses
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