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"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).
About the author
Rosmarie Waldrop, born in Germany in 1935, is the author of several books of poetry, fiction, and essays, and a noted translator of French and German poetry. Her most recent books are
The Nick of Time,
Gap Gardening: Selected Poems (winner of the Los Angeles Book Prize), and
Driven to Abstraction. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts of Letters, and is a Chevalier of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. For fifty-six years, she and her husband Keith Waldrop ran one of the country's most vibrant experimental poetry presses, Burning Deck, in Providence, Rhode Island.
Summary
A philosophical tour de force melding astrophysics and grief by the American maestra of the prose poem
