What After Grows

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McCullough, Catherine
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As its title suggests, <i>What After Grows</i> is a collection of poetry concerned with time and how we respond to the internal and external transformations that accompany the passage of time. In these poems, time is at turns a force of destruction and of healing; of violent upheaval and of long, slow process. Through the progress of the collection itself, the reader encounters a poetic voice strengthening into a greater self-assertion and a new will toward hope and acceptance of time's fleetingness. Divided into four sections with a Proem and Epilogue, <i>What After Grows</i> explores the landscapes of family and nature; place and history; decay and regeneration. It also interrogates the binaries of inner and outer, self and other, and present and memory. Contemplative and self-reflective, many of the poems are defined by the questions they ask, rather than the answers they give, and all seem to be in conversation with each other, moving with trepidation and awe toward a "revenant" self and a sense of "astonishing assertion" at nature's cyclical rebirth. Life feels genuinely lived in these poems; it's meditated on and not taken for granted. Each word feels measured against silence and time. Each line seems to heal the false divisions between the public and the private, between the outer meaning and the inner perception. These poems have the quality of an extraordinary conversation with one's spirit, growing, transforming the overwhelming stuff of life in to a comprehensible, if not fully comfortable, vision.
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