I have no sympathy with what I cannot eat...

And sometimes the aether peeps through:

Within the cave

Songs of winesap apple,

Yellow pear and purple grape

Shape and endlessly reshape

Against the golden rim

Dimly behind the blossoms

I make vestigial women

Dance in a silverweb of

Whispering asymmetry.

Loud, stagey, peripherally vulgar, Goldfarb celebrates himself and his environment in language so accurate, so lusty, so unmistakably public and engaging that no dissent from his accomplishment is possible.

Which is what bothers me a little. Baumgarten suggested, and experience confirms that really "spiritual" poetry stops being poetry pretty soon. It migrates from the particular to the universal too quickly to come down hard on the stuff of experience; it robs us of sensation and pays us back in the inflated currency of Concepts. Goldfarb is too hip, too conscious of what any reading audience wants, to bypass the senses. Maybe he appeals to them too often. We develop such faith in his experience -- such confidence in his brilliantly modulated rhetoric -- that we are willing to accept almost any statement as poetically valid, even passages where epigram takes the place of idiom, and ideology assumes the role of experience.

so here I am,

No less than man, plunged and tossed amid Gods