If in Time

Selected Poems 1975-2000

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Ann Lauterbach is one of America's most inventive and admired poets. Since the mid-1970s, she has explored the ways in which language simultaneously captures and forfeits our experience. By turns elegiac, fierce, and sensuous, her musically-charged poems subvert distinctions between narrative coherence and fragmentary elision, between outward attention and inward response. Throughout, Lauterbach questions the hope for personal agency within proliferating fields of cultural and historical event. If In Time brings together selections from each of her first five collections, as well as an exhilarating group of new poems.
© Marina van Zuylen
Ann Lauterbach is the author of ten books of poetry and three books of essays, including The Night Sky: Writings on the Poetics of Experience and The Given & The Chosen; her 2009 collection, Or To Begin Again, was a finalist for the National Book Award. Lauterbach’s work has been recognized by fellowships from, among others, the Guggenheim Foundation and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. She is the Ruth and David Schwab II Professor of Languages and Literatures at Bard College. A native of New York City, she lives in Germantown, New York. View titles by Ann Lauterbach
If in TimeThe Call (1997-2000)
Template
September Song
Typography
Diorama of the Uninhabited Yes
Walk
Legacy
New Brooms
Winter Strawberries
Narcolepsy
The Call
The Same Moon
Splendor
Snow
Interleavings (Paul Celan)
A Novelist Speaks (Don DeLillo)
Invoice
C Is Forgiving
Frayed Edges
Freesia Errata Slip

from On A Stair (1996)
Invocation
On (Word)
On (Thing)
On (Dream)
A Clown,Some Colors, A Doll, Her Stories, A Song, A Moonlit Cove
Nocturnal Real
A Valentine for Tomorrow
Staircase
Daylight Savings Time
Blake's Lagoon
Night Barrier
Poise on Row
Sequence with Dream Objects in Real Time
Free Fall
And the Question Of
Poem with Last Line from Epictetus

from And For Example (1994)
The Prior
Rancor of the Empirical
The Untelling
Eclipse with Object
from For Example
Stepping Out
Tangled Reliquary
Lost Section
Song of the Already Sung
Of the Fire
And the Fire Spread

Seven Songs for Joe
Missing Ages
Harm's Way, Arm's Reach
Ashes, Ashes (Robert Ryman, Susan Crile)
In the Museum of the Word
(Henri Matisse)
When Color Disappoints (Joseph Beuys)

from Clamor (1991)
Tuscan Visit (Simone Martini)
Gesture and Flight
The French Girl
Tribe (Stamina of the Unseen)
Clamor
Boy Sleeping
Of the Meadow
How Things Bear Their Telling
Local Branch
Prom in Toledo Night
Remorse of the Depicted
Lakeview Diner
Not That It Could Be Finished
Annotation
After the Storm
Report
Tock

from Before Recollection (1987)
Subject to Change
The Vanquished
Poem for Margrit, for Frida
Closing Hours
Psyche's Dream
Still
Saint Lucia
Holding Air
As Far As the Eye Can See
Monody
Naming the House
Landscape with Vase
Carousel
Before Recollection
Medieval Evening
Lake of Isles
Topaz
Path
Coastal
Aperture
Vernal Elegy
A Simple Service
The Walled Palace
Narrow Margins
Later That Evening

from Many Times, But Then (1979)
A Visit to the Country
Gramercy Park Evening
Then Suddenly
Along the Way
Winter Sky
True and False Green
The White Sequence
Configuration of One
Gray Morning
Poem
Romance
As It Turns Out
The Day After
Last Night It Rained
Standing at a Distance
And So
East River Barge
Reynolda Gardens
Country Evenings
After All
The Relinquished
Second Descent: 1975
Quotations from Reality

About

Ann Lauterbach is one of America's most inventive and admired poets. Since the mid-1970s, she has explored the ways in which language simultaneously captures and forfeits our experience. By turns elegiac, fierce, and sensuous, her musically-charged poems subvert distinctions between narrative coherence and fragmentary elision, between outward attention and inward response. Throughout, Lauterbach questions the hope for personal agency within proliferating fields of cultural and historical event. If In Time brings together selections from each of her first five collections, as well as an exhilarating group of new poems.

Author

© Marina van Zuylen
Ann Lauterbach is the author of ten books of poetry and three books of essays, including The Night Sky: Writings on the Poetics of Experience and The Given & The Chosen; her 2009 collection, Or To Begin Again, was a finalist for the National Book Award. Lauterbach’s work has been recognized by fellowships from, among others, the Guggenheim Foundation and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. She is the Ruth and David Schwab II Professor of Languages and Literatures at Bard College. A native of New York City, she lives in Germantown, New York. View titles by Ann Lauterbach

Table of Contents

If in TimeThe Call (1997-2000)
Template
September Song
Typography
Diorama of the Uninhabited Yes
Walk
Legacy
New Brooms
Winter Strawberries
Narcolepsy
The Call
The Same Moon
Splendor
Snow
Interleavings (Paul Celan)
A Novelist Speaks (Don DeLillo)
Invoice
C Is Forgiving
Frayed Edges
Freesia Errata Slip

from On A Stair (1996)
Invocation
On (Word)
On (Thing)
On (Dream)
A Clown,Some Colors, A Doll, Her Stories, A Song, A Moonlit Cove
Nocturnal Real
A Valentine for Tomorrow
Staircase
Daylight Savings Time
Blake's Lagoon
Night Barrier
Poise on Row
Sequence with Dream Objects in Real Time
Free Fall
And the Question Of
Poem with Last Line from Epictetus

from And For Example (1994)
The Prior
Rancor of the Empirical
The Untelling
Eclipse with Object
from For Example
Stepping Out
Tangled Reliquary
Lost Section
Song of the Already Sung
Of the Fire
And the Fire Spread

Seven Songs for Joe
Missing Ages
Harm's Way, Arm's Reach
Ashes, Ashes (Robert Ryman, Susan Crile)
In the Museum of the Word
(Henri Matisse)
When Color Disappoints (Joseph Beuys)

from Clamor (1991)
Tuscan Visit (Simone Martini)
Gesture and Flight
The French Girl
Tribe (Stamina of the Unseen)
Clamor
Boy Sleeping
Of the Meadow
How Things Bear Their Telling
Local Branch
Prom in Toledo Night
Remorse of the Depicted
Lakeview Diner
Not That It Could Be Finished
Annotation
After the Storm
Report
Tock

from Before Recollection (1987)
Subject to Change
The Vanquished
Poem for Margrit, for Frida
Closing Hours
Psyche's Dream
Still
Saint Lucia
Holding Air
As Far As the Eye Can See
Monody
Naming the House
Landscape with Vase
Carousel
Before Recollection
Medieval Evening
Lake of Isles
Topaz
Path
Coastal
Aperture
Vernal Elegy
A Simple Service
The Walled Palace
Narrow Margins
Later That Evening

from Many Times, But Then (1979)
A Visit to the Country
Gramercy Park Evening
Then Suddenly
Along the Way
Winter Sky
True and False Green
The White Sequence
Configuration of One
Gray Morning
Poem
Romance
As It Turns Out
The Day After
Last Night It Rained
Standing at a Distance
And So
East River Barge
Reynolda Gardens
Country Evenings
After All
The Relinquished
Second Descent: 1975
Quotations from Reality