For Now

James Richardson

Classic meets contemporary in James Richardson’s ninth collection. Writers from Bashō to Hardy, from Merwin to Porchia, inspire meditations on everything from artichokes to cosmology that somehow morph into fables of limitation and desire. This “new poetry made the old way” takes seriously the task of lightening and illuminating our experience, and especially, of distilling it. As Richardson writes, “The road not taken also would have gotten me home.” More than sixty poems of ten lines or fewer, and two sequences of Richardson’s trademark aphorisms and “ten-second essays,” are set alongside surging lyric meditations and odes. For Now celebrates nows of every length, from the sweep of cosmic evolution, to the span of a life, to the glint of dew on a cold shovel.

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ISBN: 9781556595790

Format: Paperback

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Listen to James Richardson read “The Touch” from For Now:

I Remember Stopping on a Little Bridge in 1972

                                    It is so late
it is early, and there, once again,
is that thrilling and disturbing bird
of dawn, its four notes,
one two THREE, four climbing
a little way up into the future
and back down, and once again
everything that’s mine is in a rental truck
or in the future.

I should tell this boy
who has pulled over by a little river
just so he can breathe, this boy
wishing so hard for this to be over
that he has called me here—I should tell him
to relax, that it’s going to be OK,
that he’ll get there by sunset,
sit among boxes with a six-pack,
letting the TV run on and on.

I won’t tell him about the breakdown, only a day,
I won’t tell him about the worse things
that will break in a week, a month, a year,
the ones he would think he could not get over
and still be himself, the ones
he would hate me for getting over.
I tell him, however it is we’re speaking,

that it’s just fine here in the future,
so that in a few minutes he can go on,
as he did. I think him into the truck,
which hesitates but starts
this time. Now on the waters fast enough to hear,
the reflected moon
lets go, sweeps downriver.

About the Author

James Richardson’s recent collections include During (Copper Canyon, 2016), which received the the Poetry Society of America’s Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award as the best book in progress; By the Numbers: Poems and Aphorisms (Copper Canyon, 2010), a Publishers Weekly “Best Book of 2010” and a finalist for the National Book Award; Interglacial: New and Selected Poems and Aphorisms (Copper Canyon, 2004), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; and Vectors: Aphorisms and Ten-Second Essays (Copper Canyon, 2001). …

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Reviews

“Richardson is an unsung genius, America’s great living aphorist and a poet of profound compassion, wisdom, and humility… In long meditative lyrics, haiku, koans, and lines of shining brilliance, Richardson says a quiet, love-filled goodbye to every minute, and I find myself, reading this book, standing right beside him.” —NPR

“In an anxious time, readers will find welcome consolation in Richardson’s poise and empathic relationship with the things of this small world.” —Library Journal

“[Richardson’s] books are, in my view, some of the most beautiful produced by any American writer of the past few decades; they contain echoes of many poets distributed throughout many countries and centuries, yet they always sound contemporary, as if they were written last night—or ten years from now.” —Zyzzyva