The Last Two Seconds
Poems
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- 9٫99 US$
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- 9٫99 US$
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The eagerly awaited new poetry collection by Mary Jo Bang, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award
We were told that the cloud cover was a blanket
about to settle into the shape of the present
which, if we wanted to imagine it
as a person, would undoubtedly look startled—
as after a verbal berating
or in advance of a light pistol whipping.
The camera came and went, came and went,
like a masked man trying to light a too-damp fuse.
The crew was acting like a litter of mimics
trying to make a killing.
Anything to fill the vacuum of time.
—from "The Doomsday Clock"
The Last Two Seconds is an astonishing confrontation with time—our experience of it as measured out by our perceptions, our lives, and our machines. In these poems, full of vivid imagery and imaginative logic, Mary Jo Bang captures the difficulties inherent in being human in the twenty-first century, when we set our watches by nuclear disasters, species collapse, pollution, mounting inequalities, warring nations, and our own mortality. This is brilliant and profound work by an essential poet of our time.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The impressive and challenging Bang, winner of the 2007 NBCC Award for Elegy, has never been accused of optimism, but this powerful, caustic set of lyrical and antilyrical works might be her harshest collection yet. Bang rebukes herself and her readers, dresses down civilization, takes on species extinction, militarism, and bodily decay while warning us in as many ways as the language can bear that the end of everything is near. A map is "an empire/ of uncommon horror: the human speaking:/ Every moment all that matters is me.' " Thought won't help: in the title poem, "he mind/ isn't everything, only a gray-suited troop of mechanics/ working to ratchet the self through the teeth of a wheel." Animals, species, ways of life die off: "very last scene lasts for no more/ than a second; some ceramic panther/ stands in for the extinct. Is it today yet?" Bang addresses sources of doom that are not our fault (mortality) and those that are (climate change); her pessimistic conclusion draws on cultural lodestones from Virginia Woolf and Franz Kafka to Walter Benjamin and Cyndi Lauper. Attentive readers who delve into Bang's sharply articulated vision will find them unforgiving indeed and those same readers will praise her to the skies.
