April is poetry month: what's good and what's not

The good...

When your meadows lie cold, O Lord,
When the endless Angelus falls silent
In every crumbling hamlet...
Strike down your dear delicious crows
From boundless skies above
To nature's deflowered ground.

Strange armies with cries that crack,
Cold nests that winds attack.
Along yellow rivers,
Along old cross roads,
Around ditches, around holes,
Mobilize and go.
                     (from "Crows", Arthur Rimbaud)

The bad...

These high chestnut branches along Larch Street
fade above the streetlights,
                                            live without me.

A truck passes in the morning,
                                             it is full summer,
and a flock of noisy starlings leaps into the sky.

I jump from my top step,
                                             and sprawl on the lawn,
eyeglasses bouncing twice along the walk.
                                       (from "ELEGY FOUR", George Bowering)
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Could the dull denuded language in a Bowering elegy at least strike the ear as Eastern or something? Anything but this! In Rimbaud there's both ear and elegy, and a luxuriousness as of the world's first fresh assault. Bowering the Laureate, like all of them, is prescribed reading and strikes the eye with the gnawing ordinariness of the teen at your door, late again, holding his coke can. It's nothing ever (with bad Canadian verses) but this teen at your door. Could the "eyeglasses bouncing twice" have at least been knocked off this poet's ordinary face with force, for once? That would be some comfort. Anything but this, please! Rimbaud, however, and this bears repeating, looses on us a pissed off crow or two, tired of the rustic Angelus, and gives to my rightful hatred of Canadian ordinariness and national pietism the almost perfect fresh nest line and texture, as gift: the first perfect crack of attacking bird and sky.