Bart White

From the Foreword

We were at 30,000 feet over the dark Atlantic, tracing an arc through the night of July 4, 2022, a jet-fuel firework leaving American airspace, pointed toward the United Kingdom. Emma and I were finally on our way for a six-month stay in Oxford, and after the isolation and restrictions of the Covid epidemic, this flight felt like freedom.

A visit to Oxford is a lucky chance for anyone, but for a writer, for an American poet, to experience Oxford without the haste of a pre-set tour, to explore its streets at leisure, follow its canal and riverbank paths, cross and recross its bridges, pass under the same arches as Gerard Manley Hopkins, W.H. Auden and C.S. Lewis and so many other creative geniuses, to hike out to Binsey Woods, shelter in a pub from a hail storm, observe and feel the seasons’ changes in Port Meadow, with so much time for writing and walking, made me wake with purpose for every one of our days.

“YOUR SESSION IS ABOUT TO TIME OUT” was a 2-minute warning that flashed on the monitors of the public-use computers I logged onto regularly at the Oxford Public Library, words that gave urgency to my work: what was essential? What could I write and “Save” in the dwindling seconds left to me? Our magical half year seemed to run quickly to its end as well.

Your Session is About to Time Out

48 Page chapbook. Price includes shipping.

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We struggle to comprehend our own mortality. In parallel with celebrations of life, an essential task of the poet is to address the blunt fact that we die. The poems here have been part of a struggle to achieve time awareness. Meditations, Rhymes, Journeys, Song and Eros are the five thematic series that together make plenty of time.