Word: honig
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Harvard's Edwin Honig is one of many contemporary poets who are also full-time teachers at universities and colleges. As such he is in danger of being labeled and passed off as just another member of a group in whose work readers of poetry have come to expect generally good craftsmanship, an unusual precision of language, and disappointingly little in the way of content. In the most important respect, however, Honig breaks this pattern; his poems are indeed characterized by the precision of the scholar, but they try to be serious comments on matters of unusually basic importance...
...most important thing about Honig's skill as a poet is that it is unobtrustive. He cannot afford to let flights of technical proficiency distract his readers from the spectacles of the moral circus that he is showing them, and so he keeps himself the lens through which they observe. When he distorts it is to clarify or magnify the hidden part in which he feels the meaning lies, never to call direct attention to his own feelings or flaunt stylistic achievement. In this record of the greatest show on earth the poet breaks his reserve only...
...these poems, Honig most often adopts a position of removal from the subject he is treating, so that even his description of a very personal incident in "Do You Love Me?" combines dispassion with its emotional impact: ". . . Her dying sigh denies/The quiet settling idly on/His polished shoe. One blunt toe/Gleams back a flawless eye at him/As he dangles from the sigh." The poet reports single acts or aspects of the circus: the morality or the moral are implicit in the way he sees them and transmits them to the reader. And it is at this point that Honig the poet...
There is an essential, stripped-down--quality to Honig's poetry; it is clean of superfluities, nothing is overstated. Thus, without feeling any emotionalism in the author, the reader is aroused and given the mood in a few, terse lines. The poet does not often stop even to arrange a setting, but cuts immediately to the important question at hand, the particular act in the moral circus...
...Honig's willingness to treat the carnival of humanity on a moral level and his remarkable wit and facility in doing so give his poems a strange quality that is at once disturbing, provocative, and entertaining. They are not more exercises with words and meanings, nor are they pedogogical recitals of moral truth. They are experience, and like all things true their connotations are deep, direct, and mysterious...