Time & Other Solvents
A STORY OF HEALING
“Time and Other Solvents [is] a propulsive read—each poem catapults to the next. Claudia Gary’s dexterity as a poet (she makes those sonnets and villanelles look as poised as an ice-skating routine) allows her honesty to unfold in layer after layer in a sweeping memoir-in-poems that I couldn’t put down.”
—Molly Peacock, author of The Analyst and The Widow’s Crayon Box
Poems by Claudia Gary
About the book
“Claudia Gary’s exquisite formal techniques and rare candor create a panorama of decades in Time and Other Solvents. This book is a propulsive read—each poem catapults to the next. How does she combine an artistic mother’s electroshock therapy in the 1950’s with a daughter’s response—bulimia—then blend in half a century of current events? From life in New York and L.A. to the Vietnam War as viewed from Paris, Gary guides us back to New York, psychotherapy, and the rescuing practice of art with motherhood. She reveals her answers in poems illuminating an early passion for music that later becomes an adult’s embrace of poetry. Claudia Gary’s dexterity as a poet (she makes those sonnets and villanelles look as poised as an ice-skating routine) allows her honesty to unfold in layer after layer in a sweeping memoir-in-poems that I couldn’t put down.”
—Molly Peacock, author of The Analyst and The Widow’s Crayon Box
Wrong-Way Driver
I. Close Call
Returning home at twilight from the store—
your baby safely strapped into her seat,
the main road not yet widened into four,
then six lanes—in your northbound path you meet
two headlights. Is he crazy? Suicidal?
You swerve onto the shoulder but, for reasons
unknown, you spin around. Your shrill recital
of “No!” explodes the day, the night, the season.
You don’t know how you did it, but you land
across the road, turned in the right direction,
stopped on the southbound shoulder. What calm hand
has helped? The baby slumbers in perfection.
Arriving home alarmed, you phone your parents:
You’re still alive! The day before, you weren’t.
II. Adrenaline Speaks
Here on this shoulder is your place to watch
the wrong-way driver who missed killing you.
Still in his wrong-lane, slow-motion approach,
interior lights all lit, he barrels through
your consciousness again. He can’t be real.
He has the spirit of a broken brick
throwing itself against a porcelain wall.
He’s grabbed your life and given it a kick.
Was this enough? Is this what was required
to make you value each day as a gift,
or will you linger on, stubbornly mired
in everyday sensation till you drift
downstream leaving no more than alibi?
Here on this shoulder is your place to cry.