The Friday Influence

Just a quick post to celebrate the publication of Time/Tempo: The Idea of Breath (PRESS 254) by Laura Cesarco Eglin.

I had a chance to spend time with this collection pre-publication. Here’s the blurb I wrote:

Laura Cesarco Eglin’s Time/Tempo is a meditation on time unlike any other. Where time is often viewed as a limited resource, a reminder of our mortality and an immovable structure in our lives inevitably to be reckoned with, Eglin’s poems invite us into a deeper contemplation where one is asked to consider “What is left of me after I’ve left a place, after it has left me.” This visceral logic and sensibility make of time not only a companion but a dimension of self, and it is here where these poems most speak to the human experience. Eglin joins Emily Dickinson and Octavio Paz in her pursuit and engagement with what can be learned from the space between the ephemeral and everlasting. –José Angel Araguz, Ph.D., author of Rotura (Black Lawrence Press)

The poem below, “Learning Time,” embodies a number of the qualities I point out here. The poem starts off with a simple enough admission. The voice, however, continues building off the initial observation, eventually developing a meditation whose sense of intimacy lies somewhere between philosophy and diary. The result is a poem whose turns and logic feel both urgent and personal.

The ending of this poem is one of my favorite moments in the book. Cutting off mid-sentence on the word “Clouds” creates a jolt in the momentum of the poem which evokes the feeling the speaker has been lyricizing around. It is a moment at once tongue-in-cheek but also visceral, showing that humor and insight are born of the same material.

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Laura Cesarco Eglin

Learning Time

It rained yesterday and I missed it.

What happens simultaneously doesn’t
wait for witnesses and grows
in the air to then come down,
touch the trees at varying speeds
and leave the summer green a few
moments removed. That’s how
it rains again. Rain’s repeated, rain
is multiple and plural in its singularity.

Puddles in the parking lot say
there was a different picture moving
its way through a before. Clouds

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Copies of Time/Tempo: The Idea of Breath by Laura Cesarco Eglin can be purchased from PRESS 254.

Be sure to check out this microreview & interview of one of Eglin’s earlier publications.

To learn more about Eglin’s work, check out her website.