Written in the months preceding our daughter’s birth, this poem explores anticipation and transience. Several moments, for instance, evoke (obliquely) the sudden and deadly flood that swept through an Arkansas campsite in 2010. Rereading this poem, now just a few months after the early and unexpected death of my wife, I reconsider the speaker’s address to the “you” and how these words—how everything in my life—has been reframed.
Michael Robins on "In the Time of Sandpaper & Roses" |
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"Rachel Eliza Griffiths: Interview"
"The book took shape over the six years after my mother’s passing. Many of the poems came both from internal memories and the intensity of being shocked that the world would keep going, and has always, in spite of a personal loss. The poems were written out of my most primal need to remember the past and to stay very attuned to the present."
viaMOSAIC |
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What Sparks Poetry:
Taije Silverman on "The Meteor"
“'The Meteor' starts in the far past, with a blackout: 'tutto annerò.' Annerò—that’s the past remote, a tense that doesn't exist in English. It indicates a past so far past that the present can’t touch it. But Pascoli means to infiltrate, undermine it—which is part of what compels me about the poem. It’s what compels me about translation, too: this vibrant failure of equivalence that brings the past into the present and present into the past." |
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