"Absent, I come to the home of the absent," the leading Palestinian poet, Mahmoud Darwish, writes. No other poet captures the Palestinian consciousness and collective memory the way he does. At sixty-one, whether he is giving a reading in Paris or Palestine, he draws crowds of thousands, from government officials to schoolteachers, taxi drivers to students. In his latest collection, Judarieh (Mural), the poet finds himself in between love and death, wondering which of the two will conquer. "After the stranger's night, who am I?"

"Absent, I come to the home of the absent," the leading Palestinian poet, Mahmoud Darwish, writes. No other poet captures the Palestinian consciousness and collective memory the way he does. At sixty-one, whether he is giving a reading in Paris or Palestine, he draws crowds of thousands, from government officials to schoolteachers, taxi drivers to students.

Now, more than ever we feel our changing world and look to poetry to give us voice, to console and to guide. Marilyn Chin's new book of poems, Rhapsody in Plain Yellow, does precisely that. Through it, she reminds us to look within ourselves and to be aware that it is here that conflict begins. She says it best in The True Story of Mortar and Pestle,"…the bad sister pounding the good. Somewhere in / the scintillating powder we grind into light." This light is where we all live, where everything is created and destroyed."Somewhere" between our two warring selves, where friction is greatest, is where we become alive.

There is an art separate of masturbation The words have no layer of flesh to feel

St Columba wanted the text of the Gospels. Since this anecdote takes place in 6th century Ireland, he borrowed the only such book around, which belonged to Finnian of Druim, and made a copy. But when Finnian found out, he demanded not only the return of his text, but the copy as well. The king, when called upon the arbitrate, decided for Finnian: "As the calf belongs to the cow, so the copy belongs to its book." And so St Columba went to war with Finnian, and won, thus retrieving what he considered to be his copy of the sacred book.

Mientras se nos empuja a ver (vía buenos canales de publicidad) en la pantalla de los cines un muy interesante documental sobre una película que nunca se llegó a acabar -"Lost in La Mancha"-, apenas si nos hemos enterado de la existencia de una excelente película, ésta perfectamente acabada: 11'09'01 . Oxímoron donde los haya. Para mas inri, la película a la que nos referimos esta nada menos que compuesta de ortometrajes dirigidos por cineastas de primera fila provenientes de diferentes latitudes y nacionalidades.

Bajo el título El Greco to Picasso. Time, Truth and History (Del Greco a Picasso. Tiempo, Verdad e Historia), se presenta en el Museo Guggenheim de Nueva York, la primera revisión histórica del arte español en Estados Unidos. Cerca de ciento cuarenta pinturas de artistas desde Velázquez, El Greco, Murillo, Zurbarán, Goya, Mirò, Juan Gris a Dalí y Picasso, por citar algunos nombres, todos de primer orden, distribuidas tan magistralmente, a pesar de la dificultad de la disposición de la rotonda ideada por Frank Lloyd Wright, que parece que siempre estuvieron allí, y en las salas adyacentes.

On plain white paper, with plain black ink, in under one hundred pages and only a few inches along the length and across lies the eclectic, yet powerful, diverse, and appropriate collection of poetry of this year's Long Shot number 26.

Martin Reckhaus, actor/director/writer, has been living and working on the Lower East Side since the early 1980s. He is co-founder of Loretta Auditorium, a collaboration of theater artists whose latest work, NEW SCIENCE, was produced in November 2006 at Theater for the New City.

In the brief light of the solstice the wall of ice presses in, inex-

orable glacier, glinting cliffs

casting long blue shadows.