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Time
Collection of fifteen short poems. It is the fifth issue of the Titan Press Magazine. It has no ISBN.
20 pages, Paperback
Published January 1, 1988
2 people want to read
About the author
Bruce Boston
356 books118 followersI've published more than sixty books and chapbooks, including the novels Stained Glass Rain and the best-of fiction collection Masque of Dreams. My work ranges from broad humor to literary surrealism, with many stops along the way for science fiction, fantasy, and horror. My novel The Guardener's Tale (Sam's Dot, 2007) was a Bram Stoker Award Finailist and a Prometheus Award Nominee. My stories and poems have appeared in hundreds of publications, including Asimov's SF Magazine, Amazing Stories, Weird Tales, Strange Horizons, Realms of Fantasy, Year's Best Fantasy and Horror, and The Nebula Awards Showcase, and received a number of awards, most notably, a Pushcart Prize, the Bram Stoker Award, the Asimov's Readers' Award, the Rhysling Award, and the Grand Master Award of the Science Fiction Poetry Association. For more information, please visit my website at http://www.bruceboston.com/
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
January 9, 2025
Fifteen poems (mostly) on the concept of time in a very brief chapbook – inside this, so small, lies something that feels equally vast.
Time isn't just real, in many ways it is reality – without movement, no existence; without the passing of time, no movement. Yet, obvious and essential as it is, stringing words to reach for a representation of time in itself, is a challenge with few equals. Boston have returned to 'time', again and again, before this collection and after, rising to the challenge, and with a clever pen has put harness to this term, afterwards laid within the reader's reach.
Time isn't always an easy read, but the harness is infallibly applied. Playfully so, for the most part.
The simplest definition of time in the sense of how readily understandable it is to us, is the subjective one. The 'River Song' elegantly connects the subjective with the objective sense – elegant not only in flow, but in how the understanding of time in one sense facilitates the understanding of it in the other, and vice versa:
Sloop of planked wood, passage deep,
the river slows
with my slowing age,
broader the banks
and the sandy shelves of the delta,
currents are swifter
than mine, or lesser—
always there is motion. (p. 7)
It's image of age and the approaching limit of individual time as a thing of beauty due to its participation in the larger timeflow, leaves the reader as emotionally affected as intellectually. Time performs as uniquely to each as their passage is through it.
Time, more often than not, sees time as interconnected in that way – Boston was an observer of persons above anything else, with the exception of his ability to induct fates singularly; time is here often presented using both, as experienced by unique personalities in lives that are entirely their own – and another beautiful example of this begins 'Breath Falls and Is Not Stone':
Sensing at last that the voice
of the soul is not the eyes,
but the lines beneath them,
this map of falling flesh,
I cover these streets,
footfalls on voiceless stone.
I think of Rodin, the bright windows,
the statues in the high room,
of stone about to speak. (p. 10)
Here dawn is coming, eyes are windows, lines are streets – the sleeping city awakes. The wanderer of the street, perhaps inhabitant of it, treats the city as a lover, alive and breathing. Time, the movement from darkness and sleep to waking dawn, can, if perceived as such, be the animator of a city, a deity of sorts to make silent stone speak. Also Auguste Rodin sculpted 'The Thinker', the sentence reverses this, a glance to the past wherefrom this moment came.
But if time is movement, surely it can be seen as that. The most republished poem of this collection is 'Of Time and the Sidereal Shore', and it, with the elegance and essence of the tandava dance, treats time this way.
Time and again
I have known the moment
that is ever spawned
in the onrushing change
of dark to dawn
and down again.
I have seen it light
upon the breakers
and dash against the sky.
I have watched it curl
along the dunes,
elongated and limpid,
slippery as a skin of oil. (p. 3)
It continues from this to the grandeur that such a dance warrants, cosmic and eternal, and the beauty of it is how very touchable it makes time feel. Time is intimately around us, and ad eternum in every direction therefrom. There is something of divinity in a poem that can put us so close in touch with that which is so fundamental as to feel abstract and unobtainable.
Half of Time has made their way to three other collections: Sensuous Debris: Selected Poems 1970-1995, Pitchblende: Songs of Flesh, Bone, Blood, and Brief Encounters with My Third Eye: Selected Short Poems 1975-2016. The remaining seven poems remain exclusive to this booklet and is found collected nowhere else. Unfortunately, that means that they are unavailable to anyone who doesn't already have a copy or immeasurable patience: There are no second hand copies for sale now (this is written in January 2025) and there hasn't been any for at least a year. Each of these seven deserve a wider audience, with particular emphasis on 'River Song', 'Touchstone', and 'The Runner'.
The latter feels particularly relevant, still and probably ever, and so I will end this review with it's final verses.
Still the blood springs anew.
With all its feint and passion
the shadow play continues.
History jogs by fits and starts.
And sometimes it sleeps
in the hollow of its own breathing. (p. 14)
Time isn't just real, in many ways it is reality – without movement, no existence; without the passing of time, no movement. Yet, obvious and essential as it is, stringing words to reach for a representation of time in itself, is a challenge with few equals. Boston have returned to 'time', again and again, before this collection and after, rising to the challenge, and with a clever pen has put harness to this term, afterwards laid within the reader's reach.
Time isn't always an easy read, but the harness is infallibly applied. Playfully so, for the most part.
The simplest definition of time in the sense of how readily understandable it is to us, is the subjective one. The 'River Song' elegantly connects the subjective with the objective sense – elegant not only in flow, but in how the understanding of time in one sense facilitates the understanding of it in the other, and vice versa:
Sloop of planked wood, passage deep,
the river slows
with my slowing age,
broader the banks
and the sandy shelves of the delta,
currents are swifter
than mine, or lesser—
always there is motion. (p. 7)
It's image of age and the approaching limit of individual time as a thing of beauty due to its participation in the larger timeflow, leaves the reader as emotionally affected as intellectually. Time performs as uniquely to each as their passage is through it.
Time, more often than not, sees time as interconnected in that way – Boston was an observer of persons above anything else, with the exception of his ability to induct fates singularly; time is here often presented using both, as experienced by unique personalities in lives that are entirely their own – and another beautiful example of this begins 'Breath Falls and Is Not Stone':
Sensing at last that the voice
of the soul is not the eyes,
but the lines beneath them,
this map of falling flesh,
I cover these streets,
footfalls on voiceless stone.
I think of Rodin, the bright windows,
the statues in the high room,
of stone about to speak. (p. 10)
Here dawn is coming, eyes are windows, lines are streets – the sleeping city awakes. The wanderer of the street, perhaps inhabitant of it, treats the city as a lover, alive and breathing. Time, the movement from darkness and sleep to waking dawn, can, if perceived as such, be the animator of a city, a deity of sorts to make silent stone speak. Also Auguste Rodin sculpted 'The Thinker', the sentence reverses this, a glance to the past wherefrom this moment came.
But if time is movement, surely it can be seen as that. The most republished poem of this collection is 'Of Time and the Sidereal Shore', and it, with the elegance and essence of the tandava dance, treats time this way.
Time and again
I have known the moment
that is ever spawned
in the onrushing change
of dark to dawn
and down again.
I have seen it light
upon the breakers
and dash against the sky.
I have watched it curl
along the dunes,
elongated and limpid,
slippery as a skin of oil. (p. 3)
It continues from this to the grandeur that such a dance warrants, cosmic and eternal, and the beauty of it is how very touchable it makes time feel. Time is intimately around us, and ad eternum in every direction therefrom. There is something of divinity in a poem that can put us so close in touch with that which is so fundamental as to feel abstract and unobtainable.
Half of Time has made their way to three other collections: Sensuous Debris: Selected Poems 1970-1995, Pitchblende: Songs of Flesh, Bone, Blood, and Brief Encounters with My Third Eye: Selected Short Poems 1975-2016. The remaining seven poems remain exclusive to this booklet and is found collected nowhere else. Unfortunately, that means that they are unavailable to anyone who doesn't already have a copy or immeasurable patience: There are no second hand copies for sale now (this is written in January 2025) and there hasn't been any for at least a year. Each of these seven deserve a wider audience, with particular emphasis on 'River Song', 'Touchstone', and 'The Runner'.
The latter feels particularly relevant, still and probably ever, and so I will end this review with it's final verses.
Still the blood springs anew.
With all its feint and passion
the shadow play continues.
History jogs by fits and starts.
And sometimes it sleeps
in the hollow of its own breathing. (p. 14)
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