Contact Info:
Tim Mayo
P.O. Box 522
Brattleboro, VT 05302-0522
<tim-mayo@tim-mayo.net>
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Contact Info:
Tim Mayo
P.O. Box 522
Brattleboro, VT 05302-0522
<tim-mayo@tim-mayo.net>
Tim Mayo’s poems explore the taxonomies of loneliness, of memory, and of a past deep as a cave. This is a past carved from foster care and stone. A past with a bullet in its head. A realm “where all of winter is sleep.” Here, fathers are strangers and ancestral ghosts slip ever deeper into the trees. Only his “Reverie at the Keyboard” can call them forth, call them back, as these are poems that must be spoken out loud while they ask, “which home / do I live in? / the one you killed— / or the one I’ve made?” And what “makes the bottle mute with cork?” It’s in the words that ask such questions that Tim Mayo finds his strength; it’s in surrendering to the words’ answers that he finds his salvation.
—Meg Kearney, author of Home By Now, winner of the 2010 PEN New England LL Winship Award
As the title suggests, Tim Mayo’s carefully structured book deals with the multiple forms of separation: separation from the past, from a sense of family, a sense of belonging and ultimately from the self. His poems capture the sense of alienation many of us feel in this contemporary world where we want (as the poet does in The Yellow Afternoon):“the inexplicable to be/ explained and the eggshell of answers/to close over the yoke of our questions.” Full of surprising phrases and metaphors (Trapezing, Darning Needle, Self-Storage.) the poems ring with important truths such as: “you must accept the perennial fly/ its karmic place in your ointment,” and “what do we know about the world/except what we know about ourselves.” These poems are extraordinary and generous gifts.
––Patricia Fargnoli, author of Winter and Then, Something, former New Hampshire Poet Laureate
Tim Mayo Poet