The 26-Hour Day ─ Poems

Poetry. "Olivia Clare keeps what Emily Dickinson called 'Esoteric Time.' In the title poem, a dark berceuse, the hour is 'black bear o'clock,' a spell beyond tell-able time for which not even the 26 letters of the alphabet, evoked by the title, are a guaranteed talisman. 'Cryonics' admonishes a depressed friend, 'caught / in an hourglass neck / of cells not dividing,' to 'revive: / child the father / of the sand.' References to seconds, minutes, hourglasses, sands, clocks, gnomon, dials, and all manner of measuring, counting, and 'telling' time abound, as the speaker, with widdershins pluck, provocatively reverses, transgresses, and teases such limitations to fashion worlds that exempt themselves from any static or linear notion of past, present, future, or place. By attempting to word this ineffable, manifold 'within' time, Clare conjures a cosmological wunderkammer, '[k]indred, in a flickering place.'"—Lisa Russ Spaar