What was Lost, Herbert Morris, 2000

Morris, who died in 2001 at 73 years of age, wrote six books of poetry and remains fairly obscure.  This is his second book of poems that I’ve read and I love his work.  Long prose poems filling the page with no enjambment and no paragraphs, they can run on for pages as he works and reworks his topic.  This volume has long poems about Edward Hopper’s paintings, Robert Altman’s directing of Sophia Lauren and Marcello Mastroiani, James Joyce on the coast of France, and a Caravaggio painting, but my favorite was about the family car ride to the Rochaways where the 7 year old Herbert sits in the back seat with his mother, warmed by her fox collar and blanket, listening to Carmen.  He writes:  “…It may be/precisely intimation that I most savor,/the barely seen, the half-seen, the unseen,/the scene least fathomed, least definitive,/the possible lying in wait, like music,/in a direction neither specified/nor specifiable on the bright map…”  Morris has a brief bio in the Poetry Foundation website but appears otherwise to be largely forgotten—a real tragedy for someone so talented and sensitive.