In this new collection of poem-essays, poetRichard Meier continues his inquiry into daily writings (first presented in 2023,A Duration), exploring the connections between days, moving forward and backward through time.
Composed from daily writing practices and years of looping reductions and arrangements, this innovative work asks what it means to be in company. Accompanied in "this present tense that refuses no one" by an inter-generational cast of a nine-hour play, friends, strangers, trees, stones, animals, people in dreams and nightmares-and by readers of the book-Meier allows the present moment to widen and become a site of continuance: "unbranched, undivided, the whole movement of a whole body . . .free from the leaves of the grass and // revealed as a companion."
Previous praise
A DURATION
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. There is flora, fauna, weather, and domestic detail, yet the poems live in a cerebral space.
Sylee Gore, Poetry Foundation
Throughout A Duration is the deep image fully realized as the word conjures company—i.e., another person, or at least presence. What transcends the physical more than the relation of the I-Thou?
Abigail Chabitnoy, The Colorado Review
SHELLY GAVE JANE A GUITAR
Spectacularly inventive in its phrasings, unabashedly traditional in its themes and fluidly postmodern in its syntax, Meier’s second volume is also almost unremittingly sad. The title invokes Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poem on the gift of a musical instrument, whose strains, Shelley says, transfigure both joy and pain. Drenched in the language of poets who have come before him, Meier’s landscapes frame and expose a music of corroded memory and intense regret.
Publishers Weekly, Starred Review
TERRAIN VAGUE
Richard Meier’s Terrain Vague chooses a remarkably different path. Among a plethora of nearly indistinguishable voices, his rings out like that of a man waving semaphores: hills and valleys burning, fire approaching from above and around and below. It is a startling first book, a work of craft and originality and heart. Without flamboyant language it makes its presence known, refuses to engage in idle conversation and creates, by doing so, a different tone in the room...this is one of the best first books I have seen in recent years.
Pamela Greenberg, Harvard Review
Richard Meier(Omnidawn, 2012),Shelley Gave Jane a Guitar(Wave Books, 2006), andTerrain Vague, selected by Tomaz Salamun for the Verse Prize and published by Verse Press in 2001. In recent years he has practiced and taught workshops on writing and walking and other daily and durational writing practices. He is Professor of English and Writer-in-Residence at Carthage College and lives in Somers and Madison, WI.
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