Taking Our Time

Mark Belair's poems describe in elegantly concise detail the particulars of his various worlds-childhood, work, adulthood, with its inherent passages into loss. But in addition to describing, his poems also inscribe those details with the emotional depth of his observations, reminding us that it's in the revered particulars of the places we remember-shop windows, awnings curtained with rain, hospital rooms, cityscapes, dreamscapes-that the universals are revealed.

Max Garland, author of The Word We Used for It, and former Poet Laureate of Wisconsin

Taking Our Time is an extraordinary and candid chronicle of how vision unfolds in the field between seeing and seeming: "feeding not, / it seems, on the unseen / hay and oats but - having worked / the hard seasons true - on this soft / winter paradise." Work is the keyword here. Like Robert Frost and other New England poets before him, he puts faith in the essential fellowship between labor and vision. The poet acknowledges the syntactic and tonal demands of each perception and uses his masterful control of language to archive the way things "gather... to a keen point of feeling." Each unit of meaning - sound, word, sentence, line - preserves the inviolable equilibrium of the contemplation that the poet has labored to cultivate. Belair's moral commitment to the hard work required to reach this point makes Taking Our Time one of the most moving and rigorous contemplations of poetry's ethical potential."

Melih Levi, Stanford University

As usual, Mark Belair pays attention to the small nudges life gives us about mortality, fear, loss, and the multiple pleasures intervening. In all, there's the sense that what matters in life is both fleeting and incarnate as history-in stone, sounds, plaster, one's own face. Reading these, it's easy to look up from the page and find poetry where only prose theretofore lurked.

Anna Shapiro, author of Living on Air