"The poems are elegies for everything, including myself," writes James
Richardson. "Beyond this, I cannot pretend to be certain of much about
them. I suppose they reflect a self with only a tenuous grip on its
surroundings, threatened by their (and its own) continuous vanishing.
The poems respond with a helplessness, fitful control, and not a little
tenderness. Like the protagonists of The Encyclopedia of Stones: A
Pastoral, I am very slow, both unsettled and inspired by the
vertiginous strangeness and speed of events. I suspect these melancholy
and disembodied poems are attempts to arrest the moment long enough to
say farewell, to let things go rather than be subject to their
disappearance."
Originally published in 1977.
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