In Time

The title of Michael Anania's wonderful new book, In Time, could not be more appropriate. Poetry is the art of measure, of being in time and on time, both in eternity and the present moment. Anania is a master of such moments, when "music, like age, is space / and silence; something like sorrow / waits in the air," or, in his poem,"Predicaments," part of its delight is / lifting the familiar / out of the strange." This is an important book that deserves a wide readership for its music, wisdom, and close seeing of the world: "Ardor is itself a kind of order, the day, each day, stirred with it ... harbor, shadow, persimmon, bright leaves, orangery." -Paul Hoover Michael Anania's poetry has long dazzled by its precise observation, its careful, thoughtful diction, its masterful modulation of thought and attention. In the immediate landscape, Anania's keen eye sees a palimpsest of history, a layered and teeming cinema of spectral presences as alive as our selves; in the immediate moment, he reads the motions of memory, personal and ancestral. The rich and various poems of In Time are a showcase for the verbal music that has always animated Anania's lines: a music formal and somber, as in the elegies punctuating the collection, or its run of poems responding to the dark days of pandemic isolation and national and international unrest; a music as warm and lyrical as Stan Getz's saxophone sound, as complex and aggressive as that of Pharoah Sanders; a music playful and paradoxical, in the spiky Weimar-cum-blues measures of Anania's adaptation of Gay's The Beggar's Opera and Weill's Threepenny Opera. Reading In Time, following the harmonic modulations, the varied and complex time signatures of Anania's poems, we ride "the torque of one moment / giving way to another," we find ourselves, delighted and astonished,"lifting the familiar / out of the strange." -Mark Scroggins To read the work of Michael Anania is to feel as though you are in many places at once-the Missouri River, the South Loop, Chicago, dairy barns and road houses, inside a Brubeck tune, Tuscany and Calabria, a solitary moment of domestic space...an attention to place and time, the interstices and liminal spaces where thought and sensory experience meet. -Lea Graham