Eternity, Speak With This Living Man

Jeffery Paine's poems, with their philosophical agitation, erotic intensities, and abject melancholy, are clearly from an eccentrically modern sensibility, but their formal music and haunting locutions equally seem born of the l9th century. Please turn immediately to the poem "Jahrzeit", a stunning elegy to Paine's father. It waits only a stanza to reach its heartbreaking direct address.