For Now
Call it quits on a night of rain,excitable rain that fizzes and simmersas though it's been waiting years to declarewhat it has to declare, and gives the worldan imperative and an urgency. All we can dois marshal attention, allow the day to dissolve,as it does, in the nothing of our doingand the nothing we have done.That this rain hammers itself homebarely needs to be said. In between,in the half-held breath, listen fora sideways shift from Chains to Change,Wrong to Rung, Seethe to Seedand, eventually, No to Now.Day will happen, will break, they sayand when it's done, they'll say it has brokenand we (by 'we', I mean, of course, You and I)will spend it fitting edge to edge, hour to hourto convince ourselves a pattern is discerniblefor betterment, for focus, for the best.Whether we are there to divine itor whether we are not.
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- December 9, 2021
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“For Now” from LINK: POET AND WORLD: by Vona Groarke.
Published by The Gallery Press 2021.
Copyright © 2021 by Vona Groarke.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Link: Poet and World is Vona Groarke’s eighth poetry collection. Other books of hers include Four Sides Full, a book-length meditation about middle age and art frames, which she likes to think is more interesting than it sounds. A former Cullman Fellow at NYPL, she teaches at the University of Manchester in the U.K., and otherwise lives in rural Ireland, where she reads and writes.
When pandemic and crisis are the way of the world what’s a poet to do: engage in a combative full lock, or trust the personal to throw light on the public, so something slips between? Vona Groarke's Link: Poet and World explores the give-and-take between the contemporary lyric and our strangely troubled times. Twenty-six poems and their answering prose pieces (featuring the characters of Poet and World) consider how the news frames a poem, telling its home truths. Spiky, tender and funny, Link: Poet and World offers a new kind of poetry book, as enjoyable as it is daring, as crafty as it is skilled.
"Poems that . . . are vital buffers against the many storms outside."
— Los Angeles Review of Books
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