To Keep Time

Joseph Massey's third collection, To Keep Time, limns the microclimate of coastal Humboldt County, California. These poems live where modern liferadio static, a space heater, trafficcollides with the so-called natural world. With spare, vivid imagery, Massey builds brilliantly on concerns familiar to readers of his earlier works. Here "The near-silence / rattles me // to attention;" here the vagaries of language itselfwhat's been left out as much as what's been written inpenetrate the heart of these stealthy, aching poems. To Keep Time stops the world's chatter for a moment and listens to its loneliness and longing, and hears the grace in the relentlessness of days.