Domestic Recusals

These are poems unlike any that you have read before. Simon Constam considers moments, thoughts, insights that other poets, to their and our detriment, commonly ignore. Moments that look deeply at how we grow old together with our lovers.

"But these things are not what now I treasure.

Now it is the way your step makes uncertain contact with the earth,

the way your dress catches at the hip before it falls to the floor;

it is how your energy gives out in love.

It is even the way you no longer care if you have been seen

awkward, naked, walking out of the shower,

not a bit of your seventy years decorated for the view of others."

- from the poem, To a Woman

Praise for Simon Constam's poetry:

"So I'm familiar with many of the things your poems plangently evoke... Some of the poems remind me, in the best way, of poems by Yehuda Amichai and Nelly Sachs.... From time to time, also, I was reminded of some of the later poems of R. S. Thomas."

Kevin Hart is a much-honoured poet. He is the Edwin B. Kyle Professor of Christian Studies and Chair of the Religious Studies Department at the University of Virginia.