A Duration

The five long poems in Richard Meier’s A Duration follow a similar form: a prose stanza breaks off midsentence, leaving a charged empty space. That broken sentence is syntactically “completed” in the next stanza, but though the grammar jives, the reader is sometimes jerked into a world subtly or radically altered, with the poem’s subject, setting, or other details changed:

The pen reads the letters on the page and moves the hand. Carrying boxes full of drawings and books I kept thinking of Carl the age I am now helping to carry my books up the stairs in the South End, saying it was the last time. A self in the drawings is pictured as the puppet or mask

a strong physical being holds at arm’s length and studies. The sail dwindles then expands. A puppet was once called a “motion.” A witch nicely told the poet, O fool, why undo an injury? Can these things, these sounds, be seen in a person

in the state of being unrecognized, a person and artist, unrecognized as seen, unrecognition of being that?

The effect is momentary confusion—and delight. Repeated across a book, this device kindles a sense of dream logic, or of daydreaming while ambling with a friend. There is flora, fauna, weather, and domestic detail, yet the poems live in a cerebral space—fitting for a book in which the phrase “I thought” appears frequently.

There is much reported speech; “Max,” “Lisa,” and “James” recur with O’Haraian ease. Much of the text is in the past tense (even in some of the poem “This present tense”). In this dawdling, hazy space, sudden chiseled lines hit all the harder: “There isn’t any time coming out of the sun now,” or “Palliative care need not be for a mortal illness.”