Sublime poems

I'm picky about the poems that I really like and one of my criteria is that a poem should have a sublime quality. The dictionary definition states that sublime means 'very high quality' which doesn't begin to describe what I mean by the word. After all one person's 'high quality' is another person's gobblydegook. My definition would include transcendence, taking me somewhere beyond words, provoking images or memories which are unexpected. Some of Elizabeth Bishop's and Michael Longley's poems have that sublime quality which take my breath away. Jorie Graham's poem Sundown also knocks my socks off. Here's an excerpt,
Sometimes the day

                                             light winces
                                         
                                            behind you and it is

 a great treasure in this case today a man on

                                             a horse in calm full

                                             gallop on Omaha over my

                                             left shoulder coming on

                                             fast but

 calm not audible to me at all until I turned back my

                                              head for no

                                              reason as if what lies behind

                                             one had whispered

 what can I do for you today and I had just

                                              turned to

                                              answer and the answer to my

 answer flooded from the front with the late sun he/they

                                              were driving into --- gleaming --

                                              wet chest and upraised knees and

 light-struck hooves looking at me

 From 'Sundown'  by Jorie Graham in her collection P L A C E   (Carcanet 2012) 
I'm not sure if Jorie Graham intended this poem to be so sublime. It really needs to be read in full to appreciate the effect of the language and form on the page but this is one I keep returning to for poetic nourishment.

 I recently bought Kenneth Steven's sequence 'A Song among the Stones' (Polygon 2013)
which is based on an imagined journey made by Columba and a few other Christian monks
to an island off the coast of Iceland. Kenneth Steven intended the sequence to be read in one piece which I highly recommend but here is a short extract which I feel is another example of sublime poetry not because of religious or spiritual context but the sheer beauty of the writing,
look, someone said
there's a light on the sea
and they turned, clumsy and slow
mouths scabbed, dry-caked gashes
in their faces, their hands
like thumped lumps of fishes
bloodied and sore with cold
their eyes faraway, slow
deep in the bones of their faces

 (from 'A Song among the Stones' by Kenneth Steven) 




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