All That Will Be New

In the poem that opens this, hisninth collection, one of our most celebrated men of letters contemplates the“primordial tensions” felt in the crashing waves of a Northeaster, the glory andterror of the storm as “the real comes crashing finally down on you.”Contemplating as we all must the unrelenting passing of time and the harshrealities of history, Paul Mariani embodies the filmmaker Akira Kurosawa’sdictum that “the artist is the one who does not look away.”   In the face of pandemics, wa