Creatures of a Day : Poems

CREATURES OF A DAY is an unusual and powerful collection presenting intense encounters with everyday people amidst the historical and social dimensions of everyday life. The poems are meditations on memory, obligation, love, death, celebration, and sorrow. And some of them show how the making of poetry itself seems inextricably enmeshed with personal encounter and with history. This new collection includes five odes woven from interactions with others; thirteen shorter poems; and "Fern-Texts," a kind of biographical and autobiographical essay in syllabic verse on the parallel decades of the English 1790s and the American 1960s. Using quotations from the notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, "Fern-Texts" interweaves the dilemmas of love, ethics, and engagement with politics in Coleridge's life when he was in his twenties and in the poet's own life when at the same age he lived in California.