Living in Time

Hadas ( Pass It On ) reflects on time in these two sections of essays and the long poem they enclose: "The Dream Machine." Her essays approach the meaning of time from a variety of perspectives. In "Morning in Ormos" Hadas remembers her four years living in a small Greek village, a period that for her ushered in adulthood. "The Lights Must Never Go Out," the strongest essay in the book, tells of the author's experiences leading a poetry workshop for men with AIDS: writing poetry becomes a way of slowing the time they have left to live. "On Time" explains how different poets--Keats, Philip Larkin, Adrienne Rich--have viewed time as a thief of days and as a messenger of the sublime. All of these deliberations on time Hadas incorporates into the central poem, a profound meditation on reality stemming from a question her son proposes--"Mommy, was that story real you read me?" Reading and poetry are ways of mediating reality, of changing or even creating reality: "Delicate, ephemeral, complex / clusters of wish and memory and loss/take shape in patterns that inspire belief / beyond experience."
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.