In Time

<p>The title of Michael Anania's wonderful new book <em>In Time </em>could not be more appropriate. Poetry is the art of measure of being in time and on time both in eternity and the present moment. Anania is a master of such moments when music like age is space / and silence; something like sorrow / waits in the air or in his poemPredicaments part of its delight is / lifting the familiar / out of the strange. This is an important book that deserves a wide readership for its music wisdom and close seeing of the world: Ardor is itself a kind of order the day each day stirred with it ... harbor shadow persimmon bright leaves orangery. -Paul Hoover </p><p><br></p><p>Michael Anania's poetry has long dazzled by its precise observation its careful thoughtful diction its masterful modulation of thought and attention. In the immediate landscape Anania's keen eye sees a palimpsest of history a layered and teeming cinema of spectral presences as alive as our selves; in the immediate moment he reads the motions of memory personal and ancestral. The rich and various poems of <em>In Time </em>are a showcase for the verbal music that has always animated Anania's lines: a music formal and somber as in the elegies punctuating the collection or its run of poems responding to the dark days of pandemic isolation and national and international unrest; a music as warm and lyrical as Stan Getz's saxophone sound as complex and aggressive as that of Pharoah Sanders; a music playful and paradoxical in the spiky Weimar-cum-blues measures of Anania's adaptation of Gay's <em>The Beggar's Opera </em>and Weill's <em>Threepenny Opera. </em>Reading <em>In Time </em>following the harmonic modulations the varied and complex time signatures of Anania's poems we ride the torque of one moment / giving way to another we find ourselves delighted and astonishedlifting the familiar / out of the strange. </p><p>-Mark Scroggins </p><p><br></p><p>To read the work of Michael Anania is to feel as though you are in many places at once-the Missouri River the South Loop Chicago dairy barns and road houses inside a Brubeck tune Tuscany and Calabria a solitary moment of domestic space...an attention to place and time the interstices and liminal spaces where thought and sensory experience meet. </p><p>-Lea Graham </p><p><br></p>