A Loose Rendering

<p><span style=background-color: rgba(0 0 0 0)>What does it mean to think of time and memory </span><em style=background-color: rgba(0 0 0 0)>loosely</em><span style=background-color: rgba(0 0 0 0)>? T.P. Bird's work helps us answer that question. He divides his fifty renderings into three sections-Time & Memory; Poets Presidents and Me and Other Considerations. In the first his metaphors evoke a gently self-mocking nostalgia--for a Saturday trip to a barbershop a boyhood leap into a leaf pile a young soldier's time in Bavaria.... Old memories become road trips into his father's past and his grandfather's. Comfortably familiar metaphors-ice gnarled trees burning leaves stone walls full moons-code an aging man's values as he loosely reshapes a past which never leaves you and which you never leave. </span></p><p><span style=background-color: rgba(0 0 0 0)>In his second section Bird aligns his life's path with the works and days of presidents and poets. Fourteen presidents from Truman to Biden and 67 poets from Walt Whitman to Mary Oliver stand as guideposts marking his path into and through American culture. </span></p><p><span style=background-color: rgba(0 0 0 0)>In his final group of poems Other Considerations existential questions about time space memory and meaning become whimsical word puzzles image-fests and philosophical debates leading to a genuine appreciation for the beauty of the natural world and a deep albeit cautious faith in a creator. As the book's first poem concludes: If you knew the yearnings \ of aging men-you would \ hold them in your heart and \ know that your stories are soon \ to follow. </span></p>