Puckerbrush Press

In 1958, at the beginning of Constance Hunting's career as a poet, William Carlos Williams said of her After the Stravinsky Concert, "Something clicked for me and when that happens I hope I have sense enough to recognize it as a rare occurrence." In the decades since, Hunting has offered us a series of such rare moments. Like Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, Hunting has devoted her life to shaping a relatively slim but perfectly crafted ouevre. Her work ranges from imagist lyrics to a verse novella; and in the extended meditative poems of her recent years Hunting has created a mode -- witty, playful, but probingly reflective -- that is distinctively her own.

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Nothing can resist the continually repeated

Impact of a blow however slight

As you see drops of water

Fallling on one spot at long last wear

Through a stone

So all things are always the sam

And one thing will never cease

To spring from another

The clamor of silence

The shadow nothing

But light-deprived air

Silk to the West

Glass to the East