Human Figures is the newest chapbook by Nancy Eimers, the author of four previous poetry collections, Oz, A Grammar to Waking, No Moon, and Destroying Angel.
Time is the hour at which a pub closes, the moment we must put our pencils down, a way of paying later for something now. A Grammar to Waking explores moments we wake to the grammar of living time, what Virginia Woolf called "moments of being." In the drift of the present, of song in the throat of its bird and the verb in its sentence, the drift of loved one into memory, of talk from the talker to the listener, how and where does meaning live? "There are so many rules we don't even know," writes Nancy Eimers, "but we wake to them anyway." This collection offers a reflective, loving look at the mystery of the time being.
Poetic portrayals of a world obsessed with death.
No Moon is a book of poems about the powers and misadventures of memory, about chancy intimacies and unquiet departures parceled out as time, loss, death—an almanac of forces that mystify and transform our everyday lives.
A broomstick horse, clay marbles, WWII tin fighter plane, Cold War dollhouse with bomb shelter, "all the toys are vanishing," says Nancy Eimers in Oz, her fourth collection of poetry. These poems offer a paradoxical, moving elegy of things we left—or that left us—behind, not just the toys that grow obsolete, but a lost cat, a name, a monarch wing, a melting glacier, all the children at Terezín—an "immensity" that "recedes so incrementally we can't— / we just can't / put a human face on it." Eimers looks closely at what we lose and how we let go of it, sorrowfully or with secret relief, or some irresoluble hope of recovery.
