Within the Hour: Poems and Aphorisms, 1971-2026 (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781556597398)

Written from the twilight of an extraordinary literary career, James Richardson's Within the Hour pairs thirty new poems--and dozens of his signature aphorisms--with key selections from over five decades of award-winning writing. Richardson, a finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critic's Circle Award, as well as the Poets & Writers lifetime achievement Jackson Prize, is a cornerstone of contemporary American poetry. He is at his sharpest and most confessional in this collection, with one eye trained on devastating losses from his past--the car accident that claimed his parents' lives, the untimely death of his brother--and the other on his own mortality. Richardson looks past the immediate, personal impulse to elegize his dead. Instead, he asks larger questions about our collective human experience, the passage of time, and what it means to be charged with a finite life in an infinite universe. Tender even in its loftiest thoughts, Within the Hour does not rehearse memory, but recovers the past and brings it--bleeding and singing--into the present moment.

This definitive New & Selected is paved with aphorisms and sprawling lyrics, distinctive "ten-second" essays set beside tightly wound odes. Underlying the poet's formal evolution is his consistently down-to-earth language, accompanied by a philosopher's cosmic imagination. Playful and deeply observant, Richardson invites us to join him in paying deep attention to our natural and material worlds, through eyes where the ordinary takes on an extra-ordinary luster. These fifty-five years of poems coalesce into a stunning gallery of experience, and a sadly sweet reminder that there is more to this life than a single being can hold.