Barry Wallenstein's poetry, from his first book in 1977 to now, addresses his awareness of time's swift passing. The poems continue this time-honored theme and its attendant thoughts and emotions. Now in his eighth decade this theme is paramount. While time is explicitly central in the first and eighth sections, other sections speak of desire, music, current events, creatures of all sizes and states of mind. Poems in each of the groups reflect the anxieties of our current period including references to the ongoing pandemic and quarantine, as well as overriding reflections on temporality. These poems also are full of appreciation and gratitude for life's bounty. While avoiding the "personal" or autobiographical, Wallenstein's emotional life is more apparent here than in his work of the past. |
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Slippery, sensuous and sly, Barry Wallenstein's jazz-inflected poetry may get you "besotted by bliss," or offer "a burgeoning capacity/ to lick and to love." As a cure for melancholia, the poet "feels a wet frond, a fecund root." He is haunted by a sinister mortality as by a provocative sexuality, for there is never time enough for "my desire/ which grows as the moon climbs," as in plague time "the tables turn/ on our species/ so privileged for so long." Enjoy the twists and twirls, the smooth escapes and seductive entrapments throughout It's About Time: Wallenstein's is a most extraordinary voice of our own time.
—Alicia Ostriker, New York State Poet Laureate, author of The Volcano and After: Selected and New Poems, 2002-2019
The tribute that this poet pays to a jazz musician, that he connects a "nameless this to / wondrous that / outside the printed bars," can be said of his own work. Acknowledging life's "daily discordances," the craziness of our time, and the anxieties of aging, these poems respond with a jazzy flair that is rueful, cool, and full of winks and hints. To quote from “Delights," Wallenstein takes the reader driving in his lyric convertible, "top down as in the olden days — / the radio lost in the wind / until the car slows and the music ascends."
—Philip Fried, Founding Editor, The Manhattan Review, author of Among the Gliesians
It's About Time is also about jazz, in form if not in content: syncopated rhythms, unexpected riffs, improvisations. These are poems full of wry astonishment at the world, at ageing and desire, city life and plague; like brief solos on an alto sax, now joyful, now melancholy, but always inventive and surprising.
—Ruth Valentine, English poet and fiction writer, author of The Lover in Time of War
Sweet, reverent, wise, and wry, Barry Wallenstein's poems are seasoned with a fiery sheen. His work stands as a combo monument/homage/song to life—at once domestic and untamed, cozy and wild. He finds gold in the quotidian and love in the sublime. These lyric plums confront mortality and immortality with offhand finesse, offering a distinctively keen view into the windows of the coiled soul. A major contribution to the canon.
—Jeffrey Cyphers Wright, Editor of Live Mag!, author of Blue Lyre
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