Poetry

In poems written on the rocky coast of Frenchman Bay in Maine, Michael Ruby begins with wisdom and ends with delight, reversing Frost’s famous dictum about poetry. The Mouth of the Bay begins with the wisdom of the Eleatic philosophers on the coasts of southern Italy and Sicily—“There is no beginning and there is no end”—and their calls for purification. Ruby writes the words that appear in his mind when he repeats sayings of Pythagoras, Xenophanes, Empedocles and others.