A Day of Glass

Author/Contributor(s):	Salmoni, Steven
Publisher:	Chax Press
Date:	01/01/2020
Binding:	Paperback
Condition:	NEW

One pleasure afforded by Steven Salmoni’ s wondrous A Day of Glass is the quiet judiciousness with which it traces the poet’ s necessarily imperfect efforts to delineate and place. But this critical attentiveness turns out to harbor something more intimate and tender: through our tracings we let the world trace itself within us, a reciprocity in which we don’ t so much make claims as let ourselves be claimed: “ On the other hand, the sea is not the other hand” ; “ To begin to drift / to remember the form you lose when, as drift, / the sea is unthinkable. If the wave is everywhere, the wave / is everywhere.” — Tenney Nathanson , Glass is a transparent substance made in part of sand. It can be used, with sand, to measure time, in a sandglass. Windows and greenhouses are made of it. A glass can be used to reflect the self, like a mirror. Glass can be container and ornament. You can drink from a glass. You can see better by wearing glass(es). Watery surfaces often resemble glass. Glass is surface through which the eye sees depth. It is at once a wall and a portal, a form that reveals its own incapacities. Philip Glass is a composer who deals in repetitions that open to reveal the beauty of differences. Steven Salmoni’ s A Day of Glass puts all these meanings into play. An illuminating meditation on art as reflection, and as constant movement. — Susan Schultz