The Nick of Time
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- £7.49
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- £7.49
Publisher Description
A philosophical tour de force melding astrophysics and grief by the American maestra of the prose poem
“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 words, 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).
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
