Der Apfel fallt nicht weit vom Stamm.
      German Proverb

Judges Peter Krok’s & Tree Riesener’s comments: “This is a complex poem, a kaleidoscope of concrete, dramatic images (‘I set fire to your picture, watch your ears curl’) balanced by shifting layers of allusion and underlying menace, as when the narrator chants Dante (surely referring to the circles of Hell) and ‘watches us become soot.’ The intertextuality, touches of homage to other artists -- Plath’s Daddy, Dante, Van Gogh, Yeats’ white moths and silver apples -- give us some anchors as we attempt to decode the poem, as do the control of metre, internal rhyme (white, night, bright; shine, mine) and consonant rhyme (pages, poems; born, barn; green, glow). The author presents two main areas of contrast: airiness (hovering moths) and images of brightness (white chemise, inflame, shine, spark, glow, luminous, summering) vs. earthiness (farmers and serfs) and images of darkness (brown bread, blood, sooty spirit, night, grave, mossy, wintering). It would be too easy, with the German language and the references to blood and burning, to think only of the Holocaust, but in a broader sense, this poem invites us to consider danger and evil as more widespread, nearly universal.”