Time Pieces

By John Anson

Poetry. In John Anson's TIME PIECES, time, manifest in nature's seasons, the workings of the human body, and the very elements of poetry, is the force that governs our lives ("Clocks"). We are invited to think about double time vision ("Janus"), the nebulous shifts of the semiconscious mind ("Dawn and Dream"), and the intertwining of seasonal and weather changes with our moods and feelings ("Leafdrift"). The emotional core of this collection is the desire to keep a beloved child, now dead, present: "your brief flame / I watch it now ascending to invoke / the love I felt and feel, the loss like smoke, / a pool of wax, the echo of your name" ("A Candle for Hester"), as well as to honor a long, loving marriage ("The Parting," "Behind our Steps"). These poems are written in exquisitely crafted traditional poetic forms, sonnets, villanelles and ballades, which reveal the reflective and obsessive qualities of memory itself. Descriptions of paintings by Claesz, de Poorter, Linard, and others are so detailed that their works almost appear before our eyes. Nine remarkable poems are revealing portraits of women artists, from Sophronisba Anguissola to Alice Neel: "And in the bright rear window on display / beside a chest, your easel seems to say: / 'My coffer's wealth lies in my artistry'" ("Lavinia Fontana") and "You said the closest that you ever came / to a self-portrait was an empty chair / beside a window" ("Alice Neel"). "This volume also includes probably the first translation of The City of the Waters by the French symbolist, neoclassical poet, Henri de Regnier. His book is a series of elegiac sonnets commemorating the gardens of Versailles, abandoned throughout the 19th century to decay and oblivion, a fitting supplement to TIME PIECES." Nancy Kassell"

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 193992913X
• ISBN13: 9781939929136
• Release Date: September 2014
• Publisher: DOS Madres Press
• Length: 126 Pages