For Now - Paperback

by James Richardson (Author)

Classic meets contemporary in James Richardson's ninth collection. Writers from Bashō to Hardy, from Merwin to Porchia, inspire meditations on everything from artichokes to cosmology that somehow morph into fables of limitation and desire. This "new poetry made the old way" takes seriously the task of lightening and illuminating our experience, and especially, of distilling it. As Richardson writes, "The road not taken also would have gotten me home." More than sixty poems of ten lines or fewer, and two sequences of Richardson's trademark aphorisms and "ten-second essays," are set alongside surging lyric meditations and odes. For Now celebrates nows of every length, from the sweep of cosmic evolution, to the span of a life, to the glint of dew on a cold shovel.

Author Biography

James Richardson is the author of nine books of poetry and two critical studies. He is a National Book Award finalist and winner of an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, Slate, Paris Review, Yale Review, Great American Prose Poems, Geary's Guide to the World's Great Aphorists, and several volumes of The Best American Poetry. He is currently a professor of English and Creative Writing at Princeton University