The nick of time : [poems]

The nick of time [poems]

Rosmarie Waldrop

Book - 2021

"'If memory serves, it was five years ago that yours began to refuse,' Rosmarie Waldrop writes to her husband in The Nick of Time. Does it feel like crossing from an open field into the woods, the sunlight suddenly switched off? Or like a roof without edge or frame, pushed sideways in time?' Ten years in the making, Waldrop's phenomenally beautiful new collection explores the felt nature of existence as well as gravity and velocity, the second hemisphere of time, mortality and aging, language and immigration, a Chinese primer, the artist Hannah Höch, and dwarf stars. Of one sequence, 'White Is a Color,' first published as a chapbook, the Irish poet Billy Mills wrote, 'In what must be less than 1000 w...ords, Waldrop says more about the human condition and how we explore it through words than most of us would manage in a thousand pages.' Love blooms in the cut, in the gap, in the nick between memory and thought, sentence and experience. Like the late work of Cézanne, Waldrop's art has found a new way of seeing and thinking that 'vibrates on multiple registers through endless, restless exploration' (citation for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize)"--

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Subjects
American poetry > 21st century.
Poetry.
Genres
Poetry
Published
New York, NY : New Directions Publishing Corporation 2021.
Language
English
Main Author
Rosmarie Waldrop (author)
Physical Description
149 pages ; 22 cm
ISBN
9780811230537
  • The Second Hemisphere of Time
  • Asymmetry
  • Bits and Pieces
  • The Almost Audible Passing of Time
  • Interval and High Time
  • Lament for Barbara Guest: The Poem Begins in Silence
  • Velocity But No Location
  • Third Person Singular
  • Lament for Robert Creeley
  • In Pieces
  • Natural
  • Tone Deep
  • So Slight a Sound
  • Plugs and Sockets
  • Encounter
  • Sunset Theory
  • Broom or Heather
  • This Delay
  • Perseverance
  • Undivided Attenuation
  • Simple Nature
  • Any Single Thing
  • Offers of Sky
  • The Equation Must be Beautiful
  • Preconceptions without Delay
  • The Problem with Pronouns
  • Lament for Anne-Marie Albiach: A Complication of Gravity
  • Mandarin Primer
  • Aspirates
  • Tones
  • Pronunciation
  • The Radicals
  • Vocabulary
  • Characters
  • Usage
  • Adversative Conjunctions
  • Calligraphy
  • Miscellaneous Examples
  • Recapitulation
  • Otherwise Smooth
  • Lament for Michael Gizzi: No Both
  • White is a Color
  • In Anyone's Language, Again
  • Silence
  • Error
  • Nouns
  • Already Distance
  • Punctuation
  • Commas
  • Intentions
  • Detour
  • Thread
  • Possessive Case
  • A Cough
  • Traces of Seafoam on the Beach
  • The Sky
  • Life, You Replied
  • Your Name
  • The Need
  • Your Singular, My Love
  • Erased Referent
  • Excess of Air
  • Conjunctions and Constituents
  • Lament for Edmond Jabès
  • Cut with the Kitchen Knife
  • Rehearsing the Symptoms
  • Wanting
  • Thinking
  • Doubting
  • Knowing
  • Doing
  • Coupling
  • Escaping Analogy
  • Meaning
  • Translating
  • Loving Words
  • Aging
  • Acknowledgments and Sources
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

In her first new collection in a decade, Waldrop (Driven to Abstraction) astonishes with poems that explore uncertainty and grief, and reckon with time, language, and memory. As her husband's memory begins to fail, Waldrop turns to the intangible and abstract: "A sentence with the word 'time' in it already contains a shadow. Of the/ soul leaving the body." A German-born poet and translator of multiple languages, Waldrop is interested in the things that can't be conveyed: "I search the cracks between my English and German for more words/ than either has." In the long poem "cut with the kitchen knife," Waldrop beautifully examines the life and times of German dadaist Hannah Höch with traces of wry humor: "Always, in the real world,/ the brute fact. Hunger, misery, the chill of winter. The sound of boots/ marching... There is dispute if creative/ ferment will lead to religion, the internal combustion engine, or/ National Socialism. But our object of veneration is now orgasm." These intellectual poems are suffused with intimacy, as Waldrop invites the reader to accompany her on a contemplative trek through the mysteries of the universe. It's a trip well worth taking. (Sept.)

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