Living in the Now and Then
In Living in the Now and Then, Brian Palmer returns to the thingness of the world, clearing away the mental clutter of our increasingly artificial lives. Palmer is more than a nature poet in a merely descriptive sense. Like whales or islands emerging from a body of water, Palmer's poems provide "proof of something underneath." Their epiphanies are earned, not forced: "No hands / on this tight, round dial - / this bright mandala / of sea, air, / and land." From the variegated natural world to the "opal of my chambered heart," Palmer's verses offer a rare, clear view of what is real and abiding.
-Andrew Frisardi, author, The Moon on Elba
Brian Palmer seems never to have been trapped in other people's algorithms. Instead, he immerses deeply in the world, which some call nature when they feel apart from it. These are poems about learning to find constancy within and without, despite knowing that "change is all I had and have and all I'll ever have." Here you'll find sonnets, and even a Keatsian ode, shoulder to shoulder with poems discovering their own forms. The poet, capable of a winning humility, is a keen observer who can still mistake an arctic owl for a hawk, can still feel he is himself "nothing set / here in / the / all of it." It's the "all of it" Palmer invites us to sense, the privilege of our time on Earth.
-David Mason, author, Cold Fire
Brian Palmer is a poet finding his place in the natural world, with the ravens, whales, and katydids, within the seasons - the summer rain and the gloom of winter - and within himself, alive like the world around him. As a meditation on the theme, "Will I survive?", these poems inevitably turn inward, for the poet may "need some time to be, the seasons done, / within that house of place, myself," as we all do.
-Christine Yurick, author, At the End of the Day and Other Poems
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