Time and Other Solvents - Paperback

by Claudia Gary (Author)

Time and Other Solvents is a collection of poetry by Claudia Gary, reflecting on her youth and her family. Gary writes with craft; in symmetric verse and rhyme schemes. Her metier is the sonnet--the most graceful of all poetic forms. Even within this constraint, she creates delightful variation--breaking the first twelve lines not only into quatrains, but also triads and clusters of four and eight lines--sometimes even doubling those first twelve lines. But she unfailingly returns to the volta, with insight and wit. There is music in these lines.

An example:

Wrong-Way Driver

I. Close Call

Returning home at twilight from the store-

your baby safely strapped into her seat,

the main road not yet widened into four,

then six lanes-in your northbound path you meet

two headlights. Is he crazy? Suicidal?

You swerve onto the shoulder but, for reasons

unknown, you spin around. Your shrill recital

of "No!" explodes the day, the night, the season.

You don't know how you did it, but you land

across the road, turned in the right direction,

stopped on the southbound shoulder. What calm hand

has helped? The baby slumbers in perfection.

Arriving home alarmed, you phone your parents:

You're still alive! The day before, you weren't.

II. Adrenaline Speaks

Here on this shoulder is your place to watch

the wrong-way driver who missed killing you.

Still in his wrong-lane, slow-motion approach,

interior lights all lit, he barrels through

your consciousness again. He can't be real.

He has the spirit of a broken brick

throwing itself against a porcelain wall.

He's grabbed your life and given it a kick.

Was this enough? Is this what was required

to make you value each day as a gift,

or will you linger on, stubbornly mired

in everyday sensation till you drift

downstream leaving no more than alibi?

Here on this shoulder is your place to cry.