A Day of Glass

Poetry. A fearless exploration of how to proceed with inhabiting our language, when our words and our beloved lucid and reasonable sentences no longer seem to adhere to a common notion of reality. This poet is opened up to the fluid nature of our surround but wants to speak, not just to tell what is occurring, but to reach toward it, to be in tune with it. And he also wants to find how imagination itself can move when what it is working upon is already moving as constantly as the sea. He succeeds. Not surrendering to the possible confusion and whirl but staying completely specific to what is always coming and going, moving with shifting light and shifting shadow. These are poems that can be read individually, or as ongoing movements, toward his search for a new understanding of what can cohere. Reading them is to follow a line familiar enough in form to be grasped, but leading us, over and over, to new wonders. –Susan Thackrey

One pleasure afforded by Steven Salmoni’s wondrous A DAY OF GLASS is the quiet judiciousness with which it traces the poet’s necessarily imperfect efforts to delineate and place. But this critical attentiveness turns out to harbor something more intimate and tender: through our tracings we let the world trace itself within us, a reciprocity in which we don’t so much make claims as let ourselves be claimed: ‘On the other hand, the sea is not the other hand’; ‘To begin to drift / to remember the form you lose when, as drift, / the sea is unthinkable. If the wave is everywhere, the wave / is everywhere.’ –Tenney Nathanson