I enjoy the way series editor David Lehman puts the poems of his series into historical context. In 2016, the year from which these poems came, he notes that Bob Dylan won the Nobel Prize for Literature and Donald Trump was elected President of the United States. Natasha Tretheway, editor for 2017, is a poet I usually admire. She has ties to metro Atlanta and taught here at Emory before moving to teach at Northwestern in Chicago. I particularly admired her 2006 poetry collection NATIVE GUARD, which won her the Pulitzer Prize. She served two terms as the 19th Poet Laureate of the United States (2012-2014) and is author of five collections of poetry.

For the most part, I enjoyed this book. However, 2017 seems like a long time ago. People who were important to me then were still alive and we had not endured the divisive American politics that followed--or the pandemic or the riots and rage. I resonated with Billy Collins' "The Present" on page 29. This is a book of my past:

The Present
By Billy Collins

Much has been said about being in the present.
It’s the place to be, according to the gurus,
like the latest club on the downtown scene,
but no one, it seems, is able to give you directions.

It doesn’t seem desirable or even possible
to wake up every morning and begin
leaping from one second into the next
until you fall exhausted back into bed.

Plus, there’d be no past
with so many scenes to savor and regret,
and no future, the place you will die
but not before flying around with a jet-pack.

The trouble with the present is
that it’s always in a state of vanishing.
Take the second it takes to end
this sentence with a period––already gone.

What about the moment that exists
between banging your thumb
with a hammer and realizing
you are in a whole lot of pain?

What about the one that occurs
after you hear the punch line
but before you get the joke?
Is that where the wise men want us to live

in that intervening tick, the tiny slot
that occurs after you have spend hours
searching downtown for that new club
and just before you give up and head back home?

~From THE RAIN IN PORTUGAL: POEMS

Hello! This a gift from BookCrossing, a random community of book lovers. If you'd like to join the BookCrossing story of this book, please make a journal entry at our site with the BCID (bookcrossing ID) on the bookplate. BookCrossing is free to join and confidential. You don't have to join to comment.

On my last trip to the Mary Scott Nature Park Little Free Library, I saw that this book was claimed. May it have happy travels and great reading adventures.