Reginald Shepherd has been quiet on his blog because he was seriously ill for weeks—close to death even. My comments on his poems were, unknowingly, made during his illness. I have more comments on them to come, as well as on his essays.

Here's another moment that reminded me of W. G. Sebald, this one from "The Tendency of Dropped Objects to Fall":

.....   In exile Andromache's handmaid

 builds a miniature Troy with toothpicks
and superglue, with matchsticks
from a story that she read: a helpless glitter
with tinfoil walls and someone

rolls over it in his sleep.

In The Rings of Saturn, Sebald wrote about a man who built a miniature version of the Temple of Jerusalem. There's some information about Sebald's source here.

The building of miniatures with toothpicks reminds me of Brian Phillips's comparison between poetry and shortwave-radio operators, in this essay. Poetry as toothpick temples and Troys?