Ordinary Time

by Gil McElroy

Overview

The poems in this collection examine how our experience of movement through space is what lends time its dimensionality, from childhood memories of the Cold War to the Julian calendar, making manifest the arc of a complete year-long cycle of both “sacred” and “ordinary” time, returning to our ongoing attempts to guarantee the security of our place in the world.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780889226753
Publisher:	Talonbooks, Limited
Publication date:	11/01/2011
Pages:	112
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.44(d)

About the Author

Gil McElroy is a poet, visual artist, art critic, and independent curator currently living in Colborne, Ontario with his wife Heather. He was a winner of the Christina Sabat Award for Critical Writing in the Arts, and his first book Dream Pool Essays (Talonbooks, 2001) was shortlisted for the Gerald Lampert Award.

Table of Contents

Book Structure:

1) Some Julian Days comprises poems that employ the cumulative dating of the Julian Day system as an overarching structure within which the poetics of saggital time are evoked.

2) The excerpt from the poem sequence Ordinary Time (an ongoing piece inspired by Charles Olson’s poem “In the Hills South of Capernaum, Port”) works with the structure of the Anglican lectionary and its cycle of daily and weekly readings (called “propers”) from the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament to manifest the poetry of a portion – an arc, if you will – of the complete two year-long cycle of readings from sacred texts.

3) Imaginary Time escapes from all of that, deferring both the immediate contexts of the narrative arrow and eternally cyclic.