Rivering

Very few of these poems come to us with the demands of a determined art; rather, as in the first poems of Cavafy, the grace of Dean Kostos’s texts (I would call it unconscious grace, for that is the adjective which permits all heaven as much as all hell to explode, to let fly) is the result of another effort, not even the effort to please, but merely-merely!-the will to tell the truth, to tell what happened, what didn’t … It is another version of art to which the poet trusts himself, call it the grace of nature which invites the reader to return, to read again until he has made the poem an experience of his own. That is what happens here, the reader returns until he owns the poems. Or do the poems own him? Richard Howard