The title For The Time Being cunningly masquerades as a book dedicated to a being defined as one who is immersed in time at the present moment. It also suggests that experiencing life as expressed in the poems is true now, and will remain true until circumstances change in the relatively near future. The book is prefaced with a note by Richard Gilbert, PhD titled Parallels as a poetics.

Comments from others who enjoyed the book:

"It is a joy and a source of constant wonder and afterthought to witness how Stephen Bailey has made the parallel (haiku) work for his own writing with excellence. If anything this is a deeply spiritual book grounded in the writer's journey towards the silence in which God speaks to the soul and his sensing of The Other in all things and all aspects of his life. "For the Time Being" is a book to be read again and again."

-Johannes S. H. Bjerg - writer, artist, editor

"Possibly the most significant development in haiku-influenced poetry in our generation, these are both intensely personal and metaphysical poems - "The very heart of becoming" - in which the poem exceeds its own form, attaining something much larger."

-Eric Selland - poet, translator

"In Stephen Bailey's parallel poems we enter a liminal space, where time unfolds the mysteries of our origins in the echoes of now. For Bailey, we are forever becoming within the shift and pull of nature and human nature. These are poems of sunlight and shadow, and all the glimmerings in between."

-Patricia Nelson - poet, artist

"Over the years, Stephen Bailey has carved a niche for himself, finding a distinctive voice while working in the form of the parallel haiku. With For The Time Being, Bailey has uttered a major artistic statement in the genre of the short poem. This impressive collection is the culmination of one man's journey and a lifetime of developing his craft.

For The Time Being reaches into the primordial memories of the collective unconscious to explore the act of being. With an autumnal, contemplative tone, it strips away masks and touches a sense of the timeless and eternal. Serenely beautiful and deeply mysterious, Bailey has crafted a gnostic reverie in the spaces between lines. In the interstices between images, these brief contrapuntal poems create a sense of infinite space out of just a few words. Masterfully minimalist, this collection of verse is spiritual, moving, and memorable."

-Clayton Beach - poet, editor