The Not Forever

About this book

As the title of The Not Forever suggests these poems take not only mortality but also the impossibility of truly assessing mortality as their endlessly inexplicable subject. Keith Waldrops language is by turns wry brazen brilliant humorous sorrowful and entirely unforgettable as he focuses upon all that cannot be absorbed by the logical minds measure of aging and loss. Waldrop is a master at discerning what is recognizable within the not of our attention whether it is an attention to the future the past or to that instant we call the present which is the most impossible to grasp. His canny meditations make the particulars of daily life shine with an uncanny brilliance as he assesses the quintessentially human inability to exact knowledge from the existence that we live as well as from the inexistence that we each are veering toward. A major force in American avantgarde poetics for decades Waldrop gives us an emotionally compelling intellectually demanding articulation of what living in full awareness of the not forever means.