Ionica

Ionica opens with a message to a “lost and unforgotten friend”: though time has carried him away, the poet asks him to search for the heart still beating in the book.

In William Johnson Cory’s nineteenth-century poems, Greek heroes and ancient cities stand beside remembered schooldays, quiet riverbanks, and the raw ache of loss. The voices are intimate even when they speak through myth: a mourner insists that death cannot take away a friend’s words; an outcast keeps watch beside a king’s ashes. Again and again, Cory turns toward what is beautiful because it cannot last, and toward the people whose absence makes it dear. What can a poem preserve when time has taken everything else?

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