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.
National Book Award finalist James Richardson’s new collection—his eighth—is his darkest, brightest, and most moving. From its breathtaking invocation to its final whispered address, During is somber, witty, curious, and exhilarated. An extended meditation on the durability of happiness and beauty, During includes more of Richardson’s profound aphorisms alongside lyric poems that wonder at this unfailingly surprising world.
For James Richardson, poetry is speculative and serious play. By the Numbers captivates with its range of line and movement, its microlyrics, crypto-quatrains, and “ten-second essays,” its aphorisms that twist and snap. Drawing from myriad lore—Ovidian and Shakespearean, georgic and scientific—Richardson makes familiar scenes strange enough to provoke startling insights.
This volume contains Richardson’s collection, Interglacial, as well as a generous retrospective of his previous five, several of which have been out of print for years. Although his diction and musical ear are clearly contemporary and American, Richardson’s sensibility is both lyric—in the classical sense—and philosophical, bringing to mind poets as dissimilar as Wallace Stevens and the Romantics.
Laurie Sheck writes, “Vectors is a book of subversive wonders. Stunningly precise, these brilliant aphorisms and ten-second essays show a mind assessing, reassessing, discovering, and interrogating assumptions in ways that feel diamond sharp, at once good-natured, quietly sly at times, and always very shrewd.”
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