· You Got Style · Brent, In Memoriam

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September 2, 2003

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· Brent, In Memoriam ·

Today with friends I marked the sad loss recently of a dear colleague and former student. He was possessed of the gift of poetry and had the added gift of teaching it well, always communicating his love not only of the arts of language to students but the arts of life's own shaping. At his service we heard read "After Apple Picking" and "Birches," two favorite Frost poems. But for me, caught more subtly in the twenty-four lines of one stylish sentence was Brent's own "Fugal Flight":

Ablaze, bumbelbees around the rose ring and weave in threads of flight a cosmos tight, awash with petal's color trailing just behind spring's redolence wrapped around the bush as pivot for bees' sweet songs sung in round, glancing off, complementing one another like a fugue played from a central line — when a rose unfurls, flashes forth.

You see what all who knew him well can still see in his absence, the rare presence of gifts gone but not forgotten.

Permalink Comments A lovely tribute! For Brent, one hopes there's Internet access in Heaven. For you, much sympathy. Posted by Mary Lee on November 8, 2003 01:44 PM Copyright © 2007 YouGotStyle.org Unless otherwise stated, all original materials of whatever kind included in these pages, including weblog archives, are licensed under a Creative Commons License.