A series of Harry Crosby’s ecstatic, obsessional, sometimes misogynist books – with poems ranging from Whitmanesque chants to tirades to concrete poems – were published posthumously in 1931. Very nearly a poet of one infinitely variable figure, Crosby was driven to record all the changes he could ring on images of the sun: "red burning tomb," "sunflakes falling in the sea," "humanity in the forest of the sun." "Photoheliograph," a concrete poem, presents his vision at its most economical. It consists of ten lines that each repeat the word "black" (in black ink, of course) five times. In the fifth line, however, the word "SUN" burns in capital letters, at the heart of the matter of language. … In other poems and prose poems, the sun is not only the object of but also the provocation for verbal transformations: "I Take the word Sun which burns permanently in my brain. It has accuracy and alacrity. It is monomaniac in its intensity. It is a continual flash of insight. It is the marriage of Invulnerability with Yes, of the Red Wolf with the Gold Bumblebee, of Madness with Ra. 2) Birdileaves, Goldabbits, Fingertoes, Auroramor, Barbarifire, Parabolaw, Lovegown, Nombrilomane." As with [Eugene] Jolas’s sound poems, the power of the language to disassemble and recombine its parts only manifests itself in each of these local changes. One never reaches the original (and originating) sound whose absence is marked by its haunting echo through all the poem’s substitutions.