Richard Fenton Sederstrom Knihy

I had not thought much about doing another book. Nothing against a new book, I just hadn't thought about it. After my oldest and dearest friend died, though, I took stock, as one will do when he reconciles with loss. Among the stock was a cache of many more published poems that I had remembered writing. Because many of the poems are elegiac, much of the book is a view from below, but that is to be regarded, I hope, as uplifting-any direction one takes being a direction. And taken. Besides, the water is clear.

"Why Eumaeus? The fate of Achaea is shrouded, hinted at through the woeful fate of non-returning veterans of the Mycenaean grand folly. Telemachus and his Ithaca are statistics for archeology. Nor do we know what happened to Eumaeus, but Eumaeus is only a swineherd and a slave, not even a peasant. We don't need to know what happens to Eumaeus, save that we know him to be a man who understands the skills of abiding. Eumaeus is the us of non-history. We are the us who have survived, so far, as Eumaeus could tell us, in order to keep the tales alive and moving."

When I grow up I do not want to be a professional poet. So far as I am a poet at all, I write for members of the Codex, about which I have written before-"We represent the anonymous practitioners who spend their lives quietly transforming and transferring the culture to the next and the next generations" one by one and all at once. Like Transtromer's Adam Ileborgh, like you perhaps, we are those who are never missed-and who refuse to be missing.Lately, I've been reading The Magic Mountain again after close to fifty years. I am thinking of the book as a sort of ascent into the underworld, and I doubt that Mann, with his pattern of descents in his work, would argue much. This book seems to have been composed with a similar attention to space and time, the probability added that those concepts lie in such political and technical jeopardy as might be a shock even to Jeremiah. And so do we.