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The book begins with deaths: chiefly the poet's mother's, but also those of cherished mentors and friends. Poems explore living beyond those deaths and approaching old age, and then do some traveling. Williamson takes a pilgrimage to Japan and India, inspired by his practice of Zen meditation, and placed under the aegis of a saying from the great Rinzai Zen monastery at Daitoku-ji: "If you cannot endure this moment, what can you endure?" A theme then becomes enduring the public moment, with all its griefs and opportunities for growth. The reader is then transported with the poet to Italy. In 2000, Williamson began visiting Tuscany regularly, and eventually became a property owner there. The poems set in Italy dwell on an encounter with old culture, and its potential to encourage both resignation and mysticism, with moods that persist from the tutelary geniuses of two great Italian poets: the nihilistic Leopardi and the tentatively mystical Montale. Gathering around those experiences multiple lore from music, philosophy and science, it becomes an extended meditation on mental suffering, glimpses of the ecstatic, and the double nature of our life, "skull / and beatific face," with "the immortal recombinants of fire and water."
Info autore
Alan Williamson was born in Chicago in 1944 and educated at Haverford and Harvard. His most recent book of poetry is FRANCISCAN NOTES (Tupelo Press, 2019). He is an ongoing faculty member in the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers. He has taught at the University of Virginia, Harvard, Brandeis, and the University of California, Davis, where he retired as Distinguished Professor in 2013. He has won fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation and has been a poetry panelist for the NEA and for the Pulitzer Prize.
