Forget-Sadness-Grass

by Antony Di Nardo

FORGET-SADNESS-GRASS, Antony Di Nardo's sixth collection, takes its name from the Chinese ideogram for daylily, that tawny orange blossom, "an escape of Asiatic origin," which bursts its borders in the summer and, in this book, finds its way into poetry that blurs the line between the cyclical and empirical, between mysticism and lyricism. In poetry that surprises as much as it illuminates, Di Nardo delves into aspects of mortality, of memory and forgetting, the cycles of loss and discovery. He pictures the daylily with a precision that relies on the sonic and visual play of language, his aesthetics rooted in garden soil yet sublime as it seeks the splendour of open skies. If poetry can transport the mind and push the clouds aside, Forget-Sadness-Grass does just that. The book invites the reader to experience the lyric in a colloquial and contemporary re-imagining of a common roadside flower with a Stevensian subtlety and virtuosity in far more than thirteen ways. "This is a wonderfully variegated collection, where the poet evokes the life of the daylily, meditating on its beauty, couture, and transience, making surprising and mysterious connections to our personal experiences while expressing universal truths."-- Laurence Hutchman, Author of In the Writers' Conversations with Ten Canadian Poets Poetry

96 pages, Paperback

Published June 1, 2022

Reviews

[Vivian Zenari · Rating 3 out of 5]

All the poems mention lilies. Some of poems were too similar to each other for my taste, but it takes guts to be so consistent in motif. The poems are sort of old fashioned nature-love lyrics in free verse

[Penn Kemp · Rating 4 out of 5]

Paean to the daylily in all its variety; lyrics with lines that chime like this, “I marvel at the charm of the lilies”.

The title comes from the Chinese ideogram for daylily.