No Time for Death - by Harris Gardner (Paperback)

About the Book

Welcome to a world where there is no time for death. It is a place and a state of mind, both for the temporal

and the spiritual with space for the mundane and the extraordinary.

Book Synopsis

Welcome to a world where there is no time for death. It is a place and a state of mind, both for the temporal

and the spiritual with space for the mundane and the extraordinary. "No Time for Death" is Harris Gardner's

fourth published collection; it is his first in fifteen years. This poetry collection is divided into three sections:

An Argument with Time; Contemplating Mortality Instead of My Navel; and Negotiating for An Afterlife. These are serious poems with an undercurrent of humor pervading many of them. The subject matter spans the spectrum of the human condition imbued with faith, hope, and the occasional flicker of regret. It is engaged with the busy-ness of living. "No Time for Death" offers an overarching theme: Take a breath, a revitalizing pause; as for Mortality, slow down; enjoy the most of each day-to-day. What's the rush? Death can wait, can't it?

Review Quotes

No Time for Death is just the right title for this lovely collection that uses poignant wit and deep feeling

to fend off mortality in the only way that poems know how: by keeping time alive in breathing lines.

I admire the combination of playful, ebullient imagination and steady, formal restraint in these

ranging meditations on transience. There are also some extremely moving poems about Gardner's

Jewish heritage. And then there's Gardner's intuitive grasp of the instructive way that language,

by its punctuated structure, keeps reminding us of our human predicament, even as it continues beyond

the end-stopped lines.

-George Kalogeris, author of Dialogos (Antilever Press) and Camus: Carnets (Pressed Wafer Press)

Harris Gardner's collection, No Time for Death, is sharply aware of mortality. How do we understand the passing of

time, and our place in it? How do we come to terms with the certain knowledge that our lives will end? Although

these are questions without answers, Gardner, in a poem like "Entreaty to the Trees" finds a way forward through

the recognition of the world's healing beauty. The trees exhale "that we may breathe," and they nourish us with

their "full blown fruit." They, and we, are sacred parts of the whole.

-Jennifer Barber, Founding Editor, Salamander, author of Works on Paper (Word Works)

Harris Gardner's new collection of poems is a contemporary memento mori, a sustained reflection on our mortality. These poems show us many surprising ways the awareness of death insinuates itself into our daily thoughts and most private feelings. With wry and humane wit, Gardner presents us with poetic spells or rituals that do not deny death as much as they put it in its place. Like Dylan Thomas and John Donne before him, Gardner is fully intent on showing us how death shall have in the end no dominion, and that it too will die. When one is committed to life, these poems say, there really is no time for death.

-Fred Marchant, author of Said Not Said (Graywolf Press)