Horizon Note (The Brittingham Prize in Poetry, Ronald Wallace, General Editor)

A son is born too early, as if coming up over the horizon before his own dawn. An elderly father lingers at life s other horizon. In language dense and clear, playful and somber, and with a formal exactitude and emotional amplitude suggestive of her own musical training, Behn traverses these horizons extracting, like the horizon note that drones through traditional Indian music, a red needle from the sky.