The Inconclusive Rule

None of these poems have been previously published. I am the photographer for all the pictures you’ll see in the book. I was inspired to make use of the photographs, all originally taken for a different purpose, by W. G. Sebald’s use of photographs in his novel Austerlitz. Which is not to pretend to the moral and tragic dimension of that great work: these poems are motivated most often toward whimsy, stillness, or both, to which the photos are point and counterpoint. They were written over the quarter century between 1985 and 2010. I am now seventy-five years of age; I will not be writing more of them.