Within the Hour - by James Richardson (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Written from the twilight of an extraordinary literary career, James Richardson's Within the Hour pairs thirty new poems--and dozens of his signature aphorisms--with key selections from over five decades of award-winning writing. Richardson, a finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critic's Circle Award, as well as the Poets & Writers lifetime achievement Jackson Prize, is a cornerstone of contemporary American poetry. He is at his sharpest and most confessional in this collection, with one eye trained on devastating losses from his past--the car accident that claimed his parents' lives, the untimely death of his brother--and the other on his own mortality. Richardson looks past the immediate, personal impulse to elegize his dead. Instead, he asks larger questions about our collective human experience, the passage of time, and what it means to be charged with a finite life in an infinite universe. Tender even in its loftiest thoughts, Within the Hour does not rehearse memory, but recovers the past and brings it--bleeding and singing--into the present moment.

This definitive New & Selected is paved with aphorisms and sprawling lyrics, distinctive "ten-second" essays set beside tightly wound odes. Underlying the poet's formal evolution is his consistently down-to-earth language, accompanied by a philosopher's cosmic imagination. Playful and deeply observant, Richardson invites us to join him in paying deep attention to our natural and material worlds, through eyes where the ordinary takes on an extra-ordinary luster. These fifty-five years of poems coalesce into a stunning gallery of experience, and a sadly sweet reminder that there is more to this life than a single being can hold.

Review Quotes

Praise for James Richardson

"Richardson is an unsung genius, America's great living aphorist and a poet of profound compassion, wisdom, and humility."--Craig Morgan Teicher, NPR

"James Richardson is one of the finest poets now writing, and the best contemporary practitioner of the art of aphorism."--Publishers Weekly

"His books are . . . some of the most beautiful produced by any American writer of the past few decades; they contain echoes of many poets distributed throughout many countries and centuries, yet they always sound contemporary, as if they were written last night--or ten years from now."--Troy Jollimore, ZYZZYVA

"[O]ne of America's most distinctive contemporary poets . . . a powerful and moving body of work that in its intimacy and philosophical naturalism is unique in contemporary American poetry."--Boston Review

"Distinct, lively, and apparently effortless, James Richardson's voice has evolved . . . into a remarkable presence in contemporary poetry. Richardson is a moral philosopher and a student of science; his formal and intellectual rigor is matched by the compassion with which he examines our complex negotiation with love and time, illuminating our sense of ourselves. A master of concision, he has breathed new life into the art of the aphorism--becoming, in these masterful, tiny poems, a 21st century American Heraclitus."--Judges' citation, Jackson Poetry Prize

About the Author

Poet, aphorist, and essayist James Richardson is the author of During, which received the the Poetry Society of America's Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award; By the Numbers: Poems and Aphorisms, a finalist for the National Book Award; Interglacial: New and Selected Poems and Aphorisms, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; and Vectors: Aphorisms and Ten-Second Essays. Richardson's poems, microlyrics, aphorisms, and ten-second essays are widely anthologized in Best American Poetry and Pushcart collections, and also appear in The New Yorker, The Nation, The American Poetry Review, The Yale Review, Geary's Guide to the World's Great Aphorists, and more. A professor emeritus at Princeton University, where he taught for over four decades, Richardson lives in New Jersey with his wife and first reader, the scholar-critic Constance W. Hassett. They have two daughters, one an editor and poet, one a professor of criminal justice.