After asking John Robert Colombo’s permission, I posted his kind words here :
On the first day of snow, your book arrived, sent by the unseen postal worker through the mail slot of our front door. It fell onto the area mat at the foot of the door, and was lying there amid galoshes and boots when I picked it up. The galoshes and boots were dry, mercifully, but your book I find to be bathed in tears. Tears of joy and tears of sorrow.
It is a beautiful book, crafted by a beautiful poet.
Short of performing a word count, I find there are three recurring thematic words. These are “you,” followed by “seed,” followed by “we.” I look for a tell-tale line, and once I find it, I am happy, and I know I will not soon forget it. (There are precious few distillations of poetic experience in most volumes of contemporary verse.)
You have a great tell-tale line. It is “You outlive.”
Beautiful, beautiful.
I emailed my thanks to him and told him that the first line of my poem “Goodbye Sarah Burke” is borrowed from him…
Today I read this from ARC Poetry: It’s not the manner of a writer’s dying that confers fame, but the manner of her living, singing, telling and imagining. That’s why we have coined the phrases “deathless prose” and “immortal verse.”
The same we will remember Sarah Burke for how she lives .