deats’s Reviews > Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters & Seymour: An Introduction > Status Update

i’ve never known sickness -or sorrow, or disaster, for that matter- not to unfold, eventually, like a flower or a good memo. we're required only to keep looking. seymour once said, on the air, when he was eleven, that the thing he loved best. in the Bible was the word WATCH!

and poetry, surely, is a crisis, perhaps the only actionable one we can call our own

He had written, in letters that had not quite jelled yet, the single word "Delighted." The Matron of Honor, reading over my shoulder, gave a sound faintly like a snort, but I quickly looked over at the great writer and tried to show by my expression that all of us in the car knew a poem when we saw one, and were grateful.