Last week on the Seattle Poetry Chain, Eric McHenry charmed just about everyone with a poem about a violent loss of a tooth in a parking lot.

This week, McHenry chose two poets to share the eighteenth link of the chain, so here's what I'm going to do: I'm going to share one poet right now and then the second link of the chain will magically appear on Slog at 2 pm.

McHenry chose Andrew Feld and Pimone Triplett for the next link in the chain. Here's why:

They're two serious and seriously smart poets. I read them when I'm about to write, because they remind me that I'd better bring my A-game. It's hard to describe their work without diminishing it, because they're both so ambitious and versatile. Pimone is curious about religion, myth, commerce, politics, history and human intimacy, and her poems are unfailingly outward-looking. Andrew is just as wide-ranging, although he seems to have a special interest in the animal world and humanity's uncomfortable place in it. What I like most about both of them is their attention to the sentence and the line — and to the ways these two units of composition can play with, or be played against, each other. I think of the poems now being written in their little Wedgwood home and suspect that it will one day be a Seattle landmark.

Pimone Triplett is the author of these books. Here is her poem:

Abstract and Figure

(“Persephone Unbound” and “Perre’s Ventaglio III,” by Beverly Pepper,
Olympic Sculpture Park, Seattle)

Betimes, the hunt scuttled again,
a child upthrust in rock. Follow

the belows it knows of: ground
cover, pinnate frond, withering bitter-

root put there to mask or mark
the brute clearing. Some force having

fretted over the ever
about to be snatched

again stillness. (You left me
in the open field.) Further,

the land scaped
past its long ago

use by wanderers, once free to build
fires. Before that, totems beside

the Sound so a people could
take their place. Glacier slice. Pliocene.

A great rain trumping on the yawed
caldera. (I said I would be right

back.) As if we can enter by
polished steel that mirrors the half

dozen thunderhead anvils
this one sky comes down to.

Now just look at what she’s done,
her bronze midsection tethered,

textured, tongued until
what light there is resurfaces

as the world squared
empty, squared full.

Many thanks to Pimone Triplett. Tune in at 2 pm to read Andrew Feld's poem.

(Images of Persephone Unbound and Perre’s Ventaglio III from SAM's Sculpture Park site.)