What Do We Know Of Time? by Patricia Hemminger

Reading Patricia Hemminger‘s visionary What Do We Know of Time? is a delight and a privilege.  We watch bird, beast and flower offer themselves to her lucid and sensuous language, and see how she herself flowers as a poet by speaking for living things, for village and countryside and ancestors.  The profound past and the remote cosmos are nearby.  “I see that we are mayflies of the cosmos,” she says.  Vitality and mortality are her companions in this tenderly crafted, soul-satisfying work.

–Alicia Ostriker, New York State Poet Laureate, Author of The Volcano and After: Selected and New Poems, 2002-2018

Patricia Hemminger’s poems invite the reader to examine the natural world through a scientific lens that shifts between the infinitely small and the grand galactic views of an astronomer’s glass. Here, things matter across the scales of time and distance.  Rich in language and metaphoric illuminations, What Do We Know of Time? delivers the thrill of inward discoveries in ordinary moments like fishing at night or sitting together in a garden.  In the way science and art are, at their best, inextricably entangled, these poems forge a crafted and deeply moving ecopoetic narrative.

–Sean Nevin, author of Oblivio Gate, Southern Illinois University Press.

Hemminger’s meticulous science-mind wanders sea-trails and woodland paths, village lanes and city oases, measuring mortality and the enticing immortal.  The “dandelion clocks” and faraway stars, exploded, have already “flung their elemental seeds.” Though time, like reverie, cannot be charted, Hemminger studies and sings it, an abandon that I love.  It’s as if her lyricism tastes revelation and seasons mortality with that essence. In two remarkable gestures, Hemminger offers that we “understand meaning belongs to the feeling world/that lawmakers cannot bear to inhabit,” and affirms love’s fusion: present-past-present: “ripples/of the stretch of tangled weeds,/that revealed us, standing there/with nothing now between us.”  Only love—for grandchild, mother, husband, planetary convergences and explosions, and for an erotic Other—interrupts the dreamscape.  I’m seduced, too, and follow the poet’s maps.

–Judith Vollmer, Vollmer is the author of six books of poetry, including The Sound Boat: New and Selected Poems (forthcoming, Spring 2022, University of Wisconsin Press Four Lakes Prize)