Just Here, Just Now: Poems - Softcover

Dillard, R. H. W.

3.29

7 ratings by Goodreads

9780807119204: Just Here, Just Now: Poems

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0807119202 ISBN 13: 9780807119204

Publisher: LSU Press, 1994

View all copies of this ISBN edition:

From the epigraph that opens this collection to the last lines of the final poem, Just Here, Just Now is a sustained meditation on the presence of spirit in the world of daily change and variety―the just here, just now. R. H. W. Dillard asserts that “time is precious,” not only because it is fleeting but because its particulars are precious in their holiness. Dillard’s concern is with the presence of the universal in the particular, or as he puts it in “Loading a Shoebox,” with “this day, / Another day like every day / Like no other.”

Just Here, Just Now is as varied in its approaches to the spirit as it is in its poetic forms and subjects (which include serial murderers and the fall of the Soviet empire as well as personal memories of family, the death of a mother, and long letters to close friends). The collection moves from dark visions of love and loss in the first pages to meditations inspired by artists ranging from Henri Rousseau, Edgar Allan Poe, and Alfred Hitchcock to Thelonius Monk and Ornette Coleman.

Many poems in the book’s later pages deal directly with issues of meaning and belief, resolving the problems of the earlier poems through discoveries of love’s presence even in loss and the mutable moment. As “Winter Letter to Bluefield” concludes: “It is true we lose the things we hold dearest / But equally true that because we hold them dear / We find ourselves which we otherwise had lost, / Find ourselves whole―just now, just here.”

"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.

About the Author:

R. H. W. Dillard, the author of four previous collections of poetry, two novels, and two books of criticism, is professor of English and head of the creative writing program at Hollins College, in Virginia. He is the 1994 recipient of the O. B. Hardison Jr. Poetry Prize, given by the Folger Shakespeare Library.

From Booklist:

Opening with an epigraph and ending with a poem filled with longing, Dillard's fifth collection seems like an extended series of thoughts on everyday spirituality. Invoking such brooding demigods of darkness as Henri Rousseau, Poe, and Hitchcock, Dillard reveals his shadowy definition of spirit. It does not involve trendy fluff about heading through the tunnel of light to meet the Big Guy but, rather, wonderfully moody contemplations about the nonmaterial and emotional energies surrounding our actions. In "Domestic Cosmology," Dillard even compares the universe to the household and its chores: "Bent light, curved space dented like dough / Waiting for the oven or bulging / As the yeast rises." Dillard is also adept at combining personal loss, such as a mother's death, with planetary-cultural loss, such as the fall of the Soviet empire. Elizabeth Gunderson

"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.