It's About Time by Barry Wallenstein (review)

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Reviewed by:

• It's About Time by Barry Wallenstein
• Melinda Thomsen (bio)

it's about time
Barry Wallenstein
New York Quarterly
https://www.nyq.org/books/title/its-about-time
128 pages; Print, $18.95

The cover of Barry Wallenstein's It's About Time shows an hourglass overfilled with sand, and Wallenstein's poems work together like moving grains of sand. They drop from the upper globe through a narrow passageway to land in a new place outside of themselves. This collection, as a whole, concludes with a feeling that time has an endless quality through the rich language Wallenstein combines with his humor, irony, and memories. Readers are almost drawn into another dimension where time no longer operates by the physics of this ancient timepiece.

When turning the first page, the hourglass turns upside down, and sands of time begin to fall, as the opening poems consider time in respect to yesterday, today, and tomorrow. Next, in the six middle sections, sand slows to pass through the narrow tube where the poet examines a range of source material from desire to COVID where wind often functions as a metaphor for the uncertainty connecting these topics. In the last two sections, sand gathers in the bottom glass globe where poems about end-of-life themes overfill the hourglass. This sand clock progression contains rich poems filled with heartbreaking understanding from a variety of viewpoints and unexpected connections.

The opening poems set up Wallenstein's perspective on time, as the speaker says, "Remember, we never wasted a moment— / not a jot in the rush— / your backroom, an hourglass on its side." The poems in the midsection of the journey focus on the way time is consumed by various speakers who have patched themselves together. Of course, these speakers make good and bad [End Page 160] choices, but that is part of the ride, so this collection encourages us to accept the natural riff of our own time, which will lead to, if not a happy ending, at least a peaceful one.

When a poem steps into time, sometimes there is an "I" or a "he" speaking, but inanimate objects contribute their views too, like the perspective of an autumn leaf in the poem "Autumn Leaf." However, the "I" and "he" voices consistently appear throughout the collection. These viewpoints add a dimension to "time," which takes readers out of the sequential role of time, and puts them in one resonating moment. In "Twins," the "he" gives some clues to this pronoun's active role in many poems, and why a variety of personas reverberate through the collection:

Twins

He was born a twinbut solitary—brotherless, sisterlessan odd number, a one.

Soon he twinnedwith every breathing being:the mother, the father,a sleepy neighbor stopping by,the family cat,and as soon as they exchanged glances,they gained his look,his features, his budding frame,his attitude

At four, when they sat him down for dinner,cleaned up and perky,all his twins imagined aging–but with their ages somehow on hold.One took on his lack of doubt.another—his bounding health,and the last, the cat,his bristling, burgeoning capacityto lick and to love. [End Page 161]

Wind works as an ongoing metaphor, disrupting the idea that people can actually control most aspects of their lives. In "Wind Advisory" the speaker prefers the sure thing when he says, "Even one leaf blown from the heap / would jinx the arrangement / and jitter his nerves." Life rarely offers certainty or orderly progression like having every leaf in its place, and this unsettling poem illustrates the speaker's extreme response to events out of his control.

Wind also appears within nature like flying creatures, or in a man-made construct like a drug-induced trip. In "High Flyer" the speaker becomes the wind image himself, and by testing the heights he risks those he most wants in his life:

High Flyer

From out the bay window,they could see me risethen ride off on a thermalhigher than ever.

From this heightI cannot read their faces.Are they amazed yet fearfulthat I might drift the way...