A peek inside Passager’s newest title, featuring poems by Morgenthau Poetry Prize Winner Winifred Hughes.
5 minutes
TRANSCRIPT
Passager recently published its newest book, The Village of New Ghosts by poet Winifred Hughes. On this episode of Burning Bright, three of the poems from that book.
Throughout the book, Winnie meditates on moving through time . . .
In this first poem, “Timepiece,” Winnie is talking to her late husband Fred.
If I put on your watchband
so it touches where it touched
the tender place on the underside
of your wrist, if I buckle it,
will I feel your pulse still
surging, will I relive your time,
each second replayed as it
once was, or will it just stop?
Will I simply step out of
chronology? Or your sweater,
if I wear it, will it displace
me or wrap me in its arms?
If I sleep on your pillow,
will I dream of you or dream
your old dreams?
“Timepiece” by Winifred Hughes from her new book The Village of New Ghosts.
I said earlier that much of Winnie’s book is a meditation on the nature of time.
Winifred Hughes: “I have this poem called momentarily about you’re always in “now.” But it’s always fleeting. It’s always becoming “then” We’re always in this tiny movement between past and future and we’re always moving.”
Here’s Winifred Hughes’s poem “Momentarily.”
If it goes unrecorded, will the moment be
lost or more itself? Will it slip through
the interstices, fade into the next as it
absorbed the one before? Just a moment—
will it be longer or shorter, will we be in it
or oblivious, will it still unite us in time
if not in place or in temper, will it last
exactly for a moment and no more
but equally no less? Is it in this spill
of sunlight over newly green willows,
in the glance of water over stones? In this one
afternoon of nothing more? Of such stillness
melting into itself and into itself until we can’t
tell but think maybe, and then it is gone.
“Momentarily,” Winifred Hughes. Here she is again.
Winifred Hughes: “I’m totally not a scientist, but one of my nephews is an astrophysicist, and he’s spent a lot of research time studying static from the Big Bang – it’s still hanging around!. I have a poem “Static” about how everything you’ve ever said is still out there, floating.”
And here’s that poem now: “Static” by Winifred Hughes.
Static left from seconds after
the big bang still floating around
the selvages of the universe
if only you can hear deep
enough, probe far enough
into spacetime, let your body
absorb the waves of vibration
tuned before time could
gather itself into moments
or eons—timelessness still
hanging around at the fringes
time, beginnings still defying
its passage. What we said
to each other not yet unsaid,
our words still resonating
somewhere beyond
us and after us, if only I could listen far
enough away.
“Static,” Winifred Hughes from her book The Village of New Ghosts.
When she was talking about time, Winnie invoked the end of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18 . . . “So long lives this, and this gives life to thee . . .” She said you give life to and reanimate your ghosts, the people from your past, when you write about them.
It’s a wonderful book, and it’d make a great present. To buy Winifred Hughes’s book The Village of New Ghosts, subscribe to or learn more about Passager and its commitment to writers over 50, go to passagerbooks.com. You can download Burning Bright from Spotify, Apple and Google Podcasts, and various other podcast apps. Passager offers a 25% discount on the journal issues featured here on Burning Bright. Visit our website to see what’s on sale this week.
For Kendra, Mary, Christine, Rosanne, and the rest of the Passager staff, I’m Jon Shorr.
