It's about Time

Barry Wallenstein's body of work stretches from his first book in 1977 to the present, and this collection returns to a subject that has long run through it: the speed with which time slips away. The poems carry that preoccupation forward, together with the thoughts and feelings it stirs. Now that the poet has reached his eighth decade, the question of time weighs more heavily than ever.

The first and eighth sections confront time directly. Between them, other sections move through desire, music, the news of the day, and a menagerie of creatures, large and small, along with a wide range of states of mind.

Every group reflects the unease of the current moment, including the ongoing pandemic and the quarantine that followed, and each one also comes back to broader meditations on temporality. Running alongside these concerns is a strong sense of gratitude for the abundance life offers.

Wallenstein steers clear of the personal and the autobiographical, yet his inner emotional life is more visible in these pages than in his earlier work.