A GERMAN BIRTHDAY

In the first dusting of snow,
The morning sun burns

The shape of the cross-brace
Under the hood of every car.

The lead crow decides again
For the other two —

Those oak crowns high enough to see
Yet another pill of foil

By which to steer,
Which shines in the grass.

To have one makes an eagles.

With one wingbeat
I’ll catch up,

The wind opening
The great boxed set of nine.



16.12.99

James Reidel
The Adirondack Review
The St. Lawrence Book Award
The St. Lawrence Book Award
The St. Lawrence Book AwardThe St. Lawrence Book AwardThe St. Lawrence Book Award
The St. Lawrence Book Award
JAMES REIDEL is the author of Vanished Act: The Life and Art of Weldon Kees, (University of Nebraska Press, 2003). An independent scholar, Reidel’s interests are in writers whose disrupted careers or neglected work need a presence in the canon. He is also a poet, having published in the New Yorker, Paris Review, TriQuarterly, New Criterion, Verse, Poets Lore, Ploughshares, and in such online journals as Cortland Review, Pierian Springs, Web-Conjunctions, the Adirondack Review, and Slope. Black Lawrence Press will publish his first collection, My Window Seat for Arlena Twigg, in Spring 2006. Also forthcoming is his rendering of two of Thomas Bernhard’s poetry cycles from the German, In Hora Mortis and Under the Iron of the Moon, published by Princeton University Press as a single volume. Reidel plans to edit a selected critical edition of Lowry’s fiction. He is also currently writing a piece about the photography of Weldon Kees for the Ephemera.