At Weep

Reginald Shepherd's poems seem to resonate with other things for me, as in my post on "Even This." The poem "At Weep" (on-line here with several other RS poems) reminded me of one of my favorite books, W. G. Sebald's The Emigrants. Here's Shepherd:

Song litters upstate New York maps
with classical towns, Attica, Utica, Syracuse,
Troy, lining the throughways with Latin

and Greek: Ithaca and the other islands
fingering slim lakes.

Here's Sebald (as translated by Michael Hulse):

Monroe, Monticello, Middletown, Wurtsboro, Wawarsing, Colchester and Cadosia, Deposit, Delhi, Neversink and Nineveh—I felt as if I and the car I sat in were being guided by remote control through an outsize toyland where the place names had been picked at random by some invisible giant child, from the ruins of another world long since abandoned.

I remember driving through the south and passing not only Athens but also Philadelphia and perhaps even a Cleveland! This from someone who spent six years living in a Toledo that is not in Spain. :-)