Carter is currently employed as a freelance writer. In this essay, Carter considers the poet's use of imagery and its parallels to Eastern thought.

"Rapture" is a poem of beginnings. Biele's word play gives just a taste of a moment, scene, or situation. The line "It starts" is repeated frequently through the poem as words to usher in the early morning ocean tide, to an idling motor in the early morning fog, to a knife sharpening in anticipation of use. These images are not random but are carefully arranged elements that give the work its energetic flow, or life force. What one would consider innocuous or seemingly bland details encountered in everyday life are the fodder of life, and of living, for Biele.

Biele bombards the reader with sensory images or miniature life portraits, yet these pictures are not quite complete. At the poem's outset, Biele uses...