To Keep Time

Joseph Massey's third collection, To Keep Time, limns the microclimate of coastal Humboldt County, California. These poems live where modern life--radio static, a space heater, traffic--collides 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 itself--what's been left out as much as what's been written in--penetrate 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.