Judson Crews

It is a little hard for me to separate my own affection for Judson Crews—as a man who has so often helped me with such a quiet sympathy—from my sense of his work as a poet. I feel, in this case, no very actual reason to. He is an isolated man, despite the continuity of his various activities, as bookseller, printer, editor, in all of which one marks the persistence of his energy. But he is not a part of a 'group,' nor does he invite this kind of identification. His poems are singular effects of the constancy of one man's attention to the oftentimes 'faceless' reality of a world, which can baffle, hurt, yet call for an endless attention and response.

I am most struck by the character of his language, evident in the selection of poems which follows. He feels the words with a marked sensuousness; they are 'real' to him, which is to say, each one offers itself to his imagination as might the texture of wet sand, or silk's softness, or smoke in air. His words are volatile. They open into guises of feeling, of senses of things, beyond the literal nature of their meaning. Often they create a feeling of deep nostalgia, and of that blocked dilemma of feeling which will not be recognized by those to whom it is offered. The women of his poems are so lovely in their being, in that they contain forever the reality of touch. But access to them is neither simple nor to be taken for granted. They will never be 'there' so simply for the mind's intention.

This world, then, is real—as one comes to know it. In it men falter, grow confused; women grow tired of their prize. Yet the words hold them, in this man's care.