Customer Reviews

TIME WAS, SHE DECLARES

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"Time was, she declares" and "hard Times" are two of the best poems to come out of the south in years. The poems in this collection are quite diverse in style and content but all capture "the original of it, the real immediate thing." As Judson Mitcham writes in the preface: "her voices are authentic, her characters convincing, her landscapes vividly realized..."

The late Adrienne Bond was a champion of poetry, particularly Southern poetry. Her own poems show why the poetry from her native region continues to be a vital part of our national literary heritage. Bond brings to her own sense of place all the love, passion, and verbal music that she can muster, giving us lyrical passage into the inescapable subjects of memory, time, and mortality. There is no heaviness in these poems, though, no brooding nostalgia; Adrienne Bond has a sense of humor: whether writing about a huge holiday meal (complete with item after delectable item on the table) or a poetry workshop infiltrated by one rebellious Agnes who keeps insisting on bringing roses into the author's poem, she charms us with her eye for the humorous, yet compassionate. detail. Her poems live in my mind, in my ear, on my tongue. What more could one ask of a book of poems?