Horology

Horology teeters on the brink; "faience" and "plumbago" float to the surface like literary flotsam but the vessel is never quite sunk. Words are strung like trade beads carrying faint signs of meaning along with their chief task of beauty, a miraculous conjuration of song. As you look at the collected bones and feathers in this Kunstkammer, suddenly it wriggles free, not a shipwreck, not an archive, but a living creature. The clock and the poem are as close as we have come to making parts cohere into a living organism. Imagine Verlaine transcribing lyrics for an opera drawn from a Burtonian study of seafaring and clocks: "a chanticleer of fo'c'sle songs" indeed.

-Martin Corless-Smith



Derek Gromadzki's Horology marks a significant advance from his first book, Pilgrimage Suites, which itself, more completely than most debuts, announced a poet already making his own sound. In Horology, Gromadzki makes his own world, and it is a world shaped by an attention to the word more focused than any other I know in contemporary poetry. And yet Horology is also a welcoming book. And yet Horology is a new poetry made new again.

-Shane McCrae