No Room for Kindness

The poems in No Room For Kindness are for the most part short and jewel like in their faceted brevity and yet are extremely fragile. The 51 "messages" are to be read as one continuous poem in which the protagonist conducts in his mind a soliloquy with the wife of his best friend and, sometimes, with that friend himself. He describes what he is feeling and thinking in this imagined affair, using images drawn from his day-to-day reading and experience. This compound poem was written when the Viet Nam war was going on.