A Day of Glass, by Steven Salmoni

Description

ISBN 978-1-946104-22-9

Poetry/Literature

2020

One pleasure afforded by Steven Salmoni’s wondrous A Day of Glass is the quiet judiciousness with which it traces the poet’s necessarily imperfect efforts to delineate and place. But this critical attentiveness turns out to harbor something more intimate and tender: through our tracings we let the world trace itself within us, a reciprocity in which we don’t so much make claims as let ourselves be claimed: “On the other hand, the sea is not the other hand”; “To begin to drift / to remember the form you lose when, as drift, / the sea is unthinkable. If the wave is everywhere, the wave / is everywhere.”    — Tenney Nathanson

Glass is a transparent substance made in part of sand. It can be used, with sand, to measure time, in a sand-glass. Windows and greenhouses are made of it. A glass can be used to reflect the self, like a mirror. Glass can be container and ornament. You can drink from a glass. You can see better by wearing glass(es). Watery surfaces often resemble glass. Glass is surface through which the eye sees depth. It is at once a wall and a portal, a form that reveals its own incapacities. Philip Glass is a composer who deals in repetitions that open to reveal the beauty of differences. Steven Salmoni’s A Day of Glass puts all these meanings into play. An illuminating meditation on art as reflection, and as constant movement.   — Susan Schultz