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| Order from the Meadowlark Bookstore |
Publisher: Meadowlark (November 2020)
ISBN: 978-1-7342477-2-5 (Paperback) Retail: $22.00
ISBN: 978-1-7362232-2-2 (Hardback) Retail: $31.99
Pages: 340
How Time Moves: New and Selected Poems brings together over 30 years of Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg's poetry on what it means to be human in a particular place, time, body, history, and story. "She is our teacher speaking from the sky, from the field, from the heartland," writes Oregon Poet Laureate Kim Stafford. "Like William Blake’s 'doors of perception,' these pages lead readers inward and outward at once," Denise Low, past poet laureate of Kansas, says of the new poems. The collection also includes poetry from Mirriam-Goldberg's previous six collections: Following the Curve, Chasing Weather, Landed, Animals in the House, Reading the Body, and Lot's Wife.
"In How Time Moves, Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg offers us a magical gift: a compilation of new and selected poems, rich with memory and meaning. 'Expect to be startled,' the poet tells us. And we are," writes poet Joy Roulier Sawyer. Poet Patricia Traxler adds, "This is the real work of a poet--to see and speak the often-hidden truths of a human life in a way that enlightens and informs." Poet Diane Suess points out that "True to its title, time is a paramount issue in these poems—not simply its passing, but its potential, in complicity with imagination, to invent and resurrect the future."
The new poems include a special section on pandemic time, exploring how the nature of our hours, days, and months change during this unprecedented era in our lives. Mirriam-Goldberg is a wise and warm companion, leading us into more vivid sight and keen insight into the times of our life, and how time tumbles across generations, landscapes, callings, and questions. As she writes in the introduction:
We don't just inhabit place: we live in time, a human construct of how we order the world as well as the ecological ground of how seasons shift, weather migrates, and the cycles of birth, age, death, and renewal unfurl. I used to think I was primarily writing about place until it occurred to me that my poetry constantly grapples with what time is and how it moves. Like all of us, I live in the place called time, and that place—a field within the field—is dizzyingly diverse and deep, made of stories and histories, callings and yearnings, hard-won wisdom and pure mystery. What does it mean to live in time? I circle around the fire of that question through my poems, gravitating toward what light and heat I glimpse.
Purchase:
Press Kit (link to PDF file)
Mirriam-Goldberg explores Pandemic Time in New Poetry Collection - Emporia Gazette
Former Kansas Poet Laureate Finds the Right Words - Leavenworth Times
Book Launch - How Time Moves, by Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg
powered by CrowdcastHarriet Lerner Interviews Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg - Lawrence Public Library
Advance Praise for How Time Moves:
"Those familiar with Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg’s verse
know the humor, the inventiveness, and the revelations. Her How Time Moves: New
and Selected Poems samples generously from all of her books, a span of twenty-five years. The new poems show a master poet at work, as in 'Thresholds,' where
story and song blend to create a further dimension, where 'all the gears of
blossom / keep turning, all the doors continually open wide.' Like William
Blake’s 'doors of perception,' these pages lead readers inward and outward at
once. Congratulations to her for this stupendous book!"
~ Denise
Low, 2007-09 Kansas Poet Laureate, Shadow Light: Poems, Red Mountain Press Editor’s Award
"This poet testifies her tug of kinship to feral
storms, kitchen appliances, crows, the pluck of old ladies, helpless love, and
other denizens of the wide world brought living to her pages. Drawn from twenty-five years of lyric devotion, Caryn brings this harvest to Meadowlark Books in
a collection with gifts for everyone: blessing, consolation, self-portrait,
field guide, yoga gesture, biblical telling, song, memory, spell. She is our
teacher speaking from the sky, from the field, from the heartland."
~ Kim
Stafford, Oregon Poet Laureate & author of Wild Honey, Tough Salt
"Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg is a generous and insightful
poet, brave in her candor and ever awake to the world around her, ready for all
the truth it can offer her each day. In Mirriam-Goldberg's poetry, even cancer
becomes epiphany, an occasion of ecstatic awakening. This is the real work of a
poet—to see and speak the often-hidden truths of a human life in a way that
enlightens and informs. In the cumulative power of her new and selected poems,
Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg accomplishes this with grace, insight, courage, and
unceasing wonder."
~ Patricia
Traxler, author of Naming the Fires
"Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg’s How Time Moves enacts the
largesse and endurance of the upright piano on its cover, in poems that span a
life with “the urgency of living in a world on the cusp of vanishing.” True to
its title, time is a paramount issue in these poems—not simply its passing, but
its potential, in complicity with imagination, to invent and resurrect the
future. 'From years ahead, I wait for her to turn into the future,' she writes
of her great-grandmother in a Lithuanian village whose inhabitants 'will face
the gun or the gas chamber,” “…and the breath/from her body that will one day
be my body.' The poems extend over the decades of Mirriam-Goldberg’s
extraordinary life, from her childhood in Brooklyn, 'where my fingernails
formed in utero,' to the Kansas prairie. The bridge between past and future is
'a freeway of stars,' and wind, and breath, and always, for Caryn
Mirriam-Goldberg, poetry."
~ Diane
Seuss, author of Four-Legged Girl and Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a
Girl
"In How Time Moves, Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg offers us a
magical gift: a compilation of new and selected poems, rich with memory and
meaning. 'Expect to be startled,' the poet tells us. And we are.
Mirriam-Goldberg’s distinctive voice is a steadying hand on the shoulder, as
she gently steers us through her treasured Kansas landscape, or turns our gaze
toward the faces of her beloveds. The poet reminds us that 'the holy does not
play by our rules,' then deftly proceeds to make all things holy: her prayers
tucked into Ponderosa pines, cranes who stencil the sky, clouds of tilted silver,
the lingering touch of a lover or child. Through her brilliant mastery of craft
and and ever-present compassion, Mirriam-Goldberg offers us a wise, humorous,
breathtakingly diverse glimpse into her world—as well as the world of our
shared human experience. As the poet tenderly says: 'I want to know this song
that breaks the mouths / of humans.' Her own song is one of piercing honesty
and exuberant hope, a rare voice in a fractured world. How Time Moves lingers
long in the heart and mind, an enduring reminder of the deep and lasting power
of poetry.'
~ Joy
Roulier Sawyer, author of Lifeguards and Tongues of Men and Angels
"Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg admonishes us: 'All the songs
you love will return like an old cat. // Expect to be startled.' Believe her. How
Time Moves is the glimmering songbook of her poetic oeuvre—a single volume
containing a book’s worth of new work in four chapters along with choice
excerpts from each of her previous six poetry volumes. Here, time becomes both
particle ('…the brown bricks chipped / by time and the stress of lasting') and
wave: 'The friend you love is all ashes now / waiting for you and others to
scatter. // The ideas you have about time or what’s right / are lighter than
all that ash.' Amidst the tumult of time's flow, there are also introspective
interludes: 'Place a wintered leaf / of your old thoughts / on a flat rock.
Wait. // Watch what the pine, an arrow / of desire for the sun, does with
time…' It is the universality of time’s passage joined with the specificity and
intimacy Mirriam-Goldberg uses to illumine and delineate her own times that
make this a rare book to cherish, a consummate gift of grace.'
~ Roy
Beckemeyer, author of Mouth Brimming Over
"For Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg, witnessing often means
'dwelling in what we don’t know.' How Time Moves, her stellar new omnibus,
allows us to witness a world redolent of possibility, a half-known world in
which we can fling ourselves across the dewy air to discover we can fly. Caryn
writes, 'to be awake enough in any place is . . . to hear what sings beneath
the human-made world.' Layer upon layer of this book houses new and sometimes
familiar friends who find each other in the cleansing light of the wind. And if
this new collection is indeed a type of house, it is surely a great tree that
sings boldly from below our human doings, 'its arms holding up rooms full of
birds.'"
~ Tyler
Robert Sheldon, Editor-in-Chief of MockingHeart Review and author of Driving Together
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| Photo by Dave Leiker |
Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg, Ph.D., the 2009-13 Kansas
Poet Laureate is the author of two dozen books, including Miriam's Well,
a novel; Everyday Magic: A Field Guide to the Mundane and Miraculous, and
Following the Curve, poetry. Her previous work includes The Divorce
Girl, a novel; Needle in the Bone, a non-fiction book on the
Holocaust; The Sky Begins At Your Feet, a bioregional memoir on cancer
and community; and six poetry collections, including the award-winning Chasing
Weather with weather chaser/photographer Stephen Locke. Founder of
Transformative Language Arts at Goddard College where she teaches,
Mirriam-Goldberg also leads writing workshops widely.
Visit Caryn at her website: www.CarynMirriamGoldberg
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