Voice to Voice in the Dark

"In the tradition of vagabond poets Walt Whitman, Vachel Lindsay, and Jack Kerouac (all of whom appear here), infused with the Beat spirit of John Clellon Holmes and the smoky blues of Billie Holiday (also present), this new poetry collection from Tim Hunt is a classic literary road trip across America, both the America of myth and memory, and the America of its perilous present. The paired words then and now serve as a leitmotif, recurring throughout these poems, which serve up memories (variously the author's own California youth in the middle section, and those of World War II veterans whose poignant recollections anchor the final section). But memory here is no mere exercise in nostalgia, but rather a map of how we got here, and in knowing this, just maybe a signpost forward. In the penultimate poem "Hush now, don't explain," a tribute to Holmes and Holiday, Hunt writes of time as "a layering of moments, / a remembering of remembering," and of the lessons that time affords, "hearing now the suffering you didn't understand then, / because now you, too, have left behind / that hopeful bravery of youth, that faith there is a script...." Abandoning the script requires a new faith, that we might reach one another if we launch our voices across the darkness, finding (in the closing poem) "some sanctuary of words as if Then / is still Now for always and ever, / even as they recede from each other / like a boat drifting off into a lake / ... and how, in this / story, a farther shore / welcomes home the drifting boat.""--