Synopses & Reviews
Synopsis
Joseph Massey s third collection, To Keep Time, limns the microclimate of coastal Humboldt County, California. These poems live where modern life radio static, a space heater, traffic collides with the so-called natural world. With spare, vivid imagery, Massey builds brilliantly on concerns familiar to readers of his earlier works. Here The near-silence / rattles me // to attention; here the vagaries of language itself what s been left out as much as what s been written in penetrate the heart of these stealthy, aching poems. To Keep Time stops the world s chatter for a moment and listens to its loneliness and longing, and hears the grace in the relentlessness of days."