Bookshelf

A Duration by Richard Meier ’88

November 8, 2023

Tags Alumni Book

(Seattle: Wave Books, 2023).

In this, the author’s fifth book of poetry, his work illustrates how “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.” Sylee Gore, in a review on the Poetry Foundation website, writes: “The five long poems in Richard Meier’s A Duration follow a similar form: a prose stanza breaks off midsentence, leaving a charged empty space. That broken sentence is syntactically ‘completed’ in the next stanza, but though the grammar jives, the reader is sometimes jerked into a world subtly or radically altered, with the poem’s subject, setting, or other details changed. ... The effect is momentary confusion — and delight. Repeated across a book, this device kindles a sense of dream logic, or of daydreaming while ambling with a friend." Meier is professor of English and writer-in-residence at Carthage College.

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