cover image TIME AND AGAIN: Poems 1940–1997

TIME AND AGAIN: Poems 1940–1997

Edward Honig, Edwin Honig, . . Xlibris, $25 (604pp) ISBN 978-0-7388-4024-6

Founder and professor emeritus of Brown University's creative writing program, Honig takes us From the Gazebos and The Moral Circus to Gifts of Light and The Immanence of Love in this welcome tour of his oeuvre. In early poems like "First Morning," Honig's fastidious attention to meter is laid bare; trochees open each stanza, followed by iambs, yielding a markedly singsong effect: "nude and tall the morning sang/ The clammy beach, the rustling foam;/ Striped green and tan/ The morning swam/ The rusting air, the raveling sand." "Desertions" affects a mellifluous staccato, also with intermittent trochees, to describe the cycle of the realized, the dead and the possible: "Sheaves of autumn split:/ a man in every pod/ bursting to the quick,/ rattling to his god." In "Spring One," a long serial poem, Honig attempts a "mock-epic meter" with alternating long and short lines which elongate his thoughts and eschew precise extended imagery, a tendency evident but not predominant in later, more artful and opaque poems, like "Santa Teresa": "I love my fever/ It is god in my mouth// My limbs the ploughs/ arms and brow ache// ...Till I/ no longer am/I." Fans of careful lyricists like Merrill will revel in this modern Romantic work as it maneuvers between despair, beauty and exhilaration. (Apr.)