Sundays

by Thomas Gardner

Continuing the work begun in 2014 s Poverty Creek Journal, the lyric essays in Thomas Gardner s Sundays focus on moments in our ordinary lives when something within us breaks and we are cast out to wander and sing, feeling [our] way toward something [in the invisible] that will press back. Deep within us is a river, under it all, where everything comes undone, Gardner writes, and over a year s-worth of Sundays, in an improvisatory prose that holds its breath at its [own] undoing, he takes us there, urging us each to find that same space opening within. Twenty turkeys in the backyard, a walk with friends from overseas to a plunging waterfall, moments in the dark when flashes across the eye become a boat in rising wind tugging against its mooring these lyric pieces, much like the sentences from Marilynne Robinson s novel Housekeeping Gardner discovers one morning pasted on the doors and windows and staircases of the building he works in, offer us pieces of the ordinary set apart, tiny squares of print, unfixed from narrative, so carefully tied together under the surface that the everyday world, like Gardner s building, seems everywhere ringed and veined with thought.

Genres: Poetry

68 pages, Paperback

Published November 1, 2020

Reviews

[James Klagge · Rating 4 out of 5]

A set of lyrical reflections over a year of Sundays. The reflections are often initiated by outdoor walks (I think this was the original intent), but not limited to that. The year is roughly the academic year (August 2016-August 2017), though academia hardly enters the reflections. The reflections are very personal. Trump's election, for instance, makes no appearance, nor do BLM rallies.
The author is a poetry professor and poetic lines from a variety of sources (noted in the back of the book) appear to shape or reinforce various experiences reflected on. There is hardly any continuity of subject from week to week. Perhaps the one thing that recurs regularly is the author's experience of something's being "undone" (as in "I came undone"). This seems to provide an opening for something new to be "done."
Each week provides something worth reflecting on, and many weeks' reflections provoked me to thinking or feeling anew.

[Tiffany]

Highly recommend.