Time-Bound: Poems

Poetry. In TIME-BOUND, Kurt Brown engages with the world he inhabits, questioning it, taking nothing for granted, prizing a broad and deep knowledge of it, both past and present, local and cosmic. The condition indicated by the book's title is one the poet does not accept resignedly but challenges by means of his art; confronting history's long amnesia, he would reclaim much of what has been lost--people, events, places, whole epochs--and serving him in this reclamation project are two weapons in particular: his appetitive intellect, never satisfied with easy answers, and his impressive command of language, which allows him a wide range of modes from the virtuosic to the plain-spoken. TIME-BOUND offers poetry for grown-ups, who face unblinkingly the world as it is and do so with existential courage.--Philip Dacey