Author(s): Rosmarie Waldrop

Poetry

"I don't doubt that I'd die," Rosmarie Waldrop writes in The Nick of Time. "I doubt, at least if I remain in Providence, there will be good weather for the funeral." Over the past four decades, Waldrop-the contemporary master of the prose poem-has had an incalculable influence on American poetry. In her new collection, ten years in the making, she continues her philosophical investigations into the nature of language and experience at the crucial moment of change-the nick of time that bursts with possibilities. Long poetic sequences travel the sound and gravity waves through mortality and aging, lament and immigration, a Chinese primer, the artist Hannah Höch, dwarf stars, and the symptoms of the human condition. Love blooms in the cut, in the gap, between memory and thought, sentence and breath. Like Cézanne in his late work, Waldrop has found a new way of seeing and thinking about her art, which "vibrates on multiple registers through endless, restless exploration" (citation for the L.A. Times Book Prize). Book jacket.