Here, in his fifth book, Richard Meier transmutes years of daily practices of attention into mesmerizing trajectories through an always unfolding present.
In the poem-essays that comprise A DURATION, writing is a physical act where writing and lived experience support one another in bodies--animal, plant, mineral, and word bodies--that are injured and heal, that die and continue in new forms, playing new roles. Here, in his fifth book, Richard Meier transmutes years of daily practices of attention--be it to a line spoken by Lear's Fool, a train to Kingston, or "red inside green stem below eight white petals in a spiral with space between them attached to the yellow center"--into mesmerizing trajectories through an always unfolding present. In the collapse of the border between writing and the body, A Duration, "play[s] both hearts with a heartbeat and kinship of place, time, mundanity in the continuous onrushing imagined joy."
"Though Meier...invokes the English Romantics, his techniques recall John Ashbery, pursuing a general failure of human speech to explain or arrest the fluid, always-disappointing world."--Publisher's Weekly
Poetry. Essay. Hybrid.