Then Gone - by Ed Hack (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

An intense and focused collection of sonnets, Then Gone explores with riveting attention the most ordinary moments of daily life with great faithfulness and finds discoveries most of us drift past without ever noticing. "A random sampling of ten of my sonnets," Ed Hack writes in his preface, "shows that the number of words per poem varies from 107 to 126, with the most ranging from 112 to 120 or fewer words to create a convincing emotional or intellectual moment that is complex, clever, nuanced, and powerful. Memorable. The sonnet, certainly as Shakespeare used and developed it, is a layered close-up of a human experience. That is the challenge that I wanted, the tradition I wanted to be a part of, the wall I wanted to lean against." It's a demanding challenge, and these poems are a testament to how honestly and generously he has met it.

Review Quotes

"In this collection, Ed Hack offers sonnets that meditate on the natural world and the truths it can show us if we look as generously at it as he does. In startling, precise, and fresh language, he evokes it all-the skies and seas, trees and birds-for meaning and finds it. He observes the light of day, the dark of night, the shifting shades in between, and shapes them into deeply satisfying metaphors on the passing of time and how it can fill us with regret and longing, gratitude and awe. The smallest, most ordinary moments-riding bikes with a neighborhood friend more than sixty years ago, completing a crossword puzzle with his wife, noticing a bird's perpetual search for food-shimmer with light and meaning. He tells us about the constant flux of our lives and the inevitability of death, yes, but, like the line in "What Time Will Bring"- "except for love, all plans are wrong"-they are, in the end, about what lasts.

-Maria Giura, author of Celibate: A Memoir and What My Father Taught Me

"Then Gone is an exquisite, achingly lovely achievement. I've spent many hours in meditative contemplation within the stringent borders of these resonant, lyrical glimpses into love, time, acceptance of change and death, the magic of the mundane, the munificence of nature's offerings. Only a gifted poet, attuned to rhythmic subtlety, could work such limitless variation within this unforgiving form. Like haiku and tanka, these sonnets work singly or in sequence as means to quiet contemplation. A rare and beautiful multilayered work.

-Kate Falvey, author of The Language of Little Girls

"Ed Hack's sonnets navigate a contemplated lifetime's worth of sic transits and ubi sunts to reach-in their clever, revealing turns-moments of clarity about 'The things we carry along with us.' Then Gone begins with the realities of retirement and relocation, but transports us far beyond quiet strolls in the subtropical sunset. This book of 100 sonnets divided into 11 sections is a book of poems interested in destinations, in the intersection of self and light and love, in a heart that after awful failures was awakened to its deepest needs by a human voice. These exquisitely well-crafted sonnets speak, in language that smooths and embellishes their solid structure and rhyme, of and for 'we exiles inexplicable / to any who are young, ' those elders for whom 'Time's a dream / of passing days.' These powerful and moving poems glow with ghosts and shine with wisdom-inflected wonder at the totality of human existence in all its fleeting beauty and dubious purpose. His world is 'an endless masquerade of balances' filled with the whispers of the bedroom and the anguished cries of strangers half a globe away. His people and his poems breathe, gasp, die, grieve, sing and challenge us to go on.

-George Guida, author of Zen of Pop and New York and Other Lovers