These Foolish Things: W.M. Rivera's The Living Clock celebrates life's "mini odysseys", #poetryreview

W.M. Rivera's The Living Clock, a chapbook of poems looking backwards towards loss and forwards towards a sunny hazy future, recognizes that sweet death just around the corner. Rivera's poems are smartly romantic, and he has a lyrical wonderful way of swooping into a poem with a narrative wing and dropping the reader into the world of the poem. His poems skip across landscapes, the globe, and the unmapped human heart.

The collection opens with "A Gift," a double helix narrative about an absent father, and the Belgian poet Emile Verhaerhen's relationship with a poem. It manages to be a personal poem about an irresponsible parent, and a poem about a creator and his creation. Both strands of the story serve as an examples of the countless emotional adventures one experiences in a lifetime.

The Living Clock celebrates life's "mini odysseys" that show up whether the speaker is considering a washer-woman on her knees or the myriad of consciousness in a "parade of bodies" crossing the Charles Bridge in Prague. Rivera's a lyric poet, and plays with rhyme while juggling our existential landscapes in his capable hands. Death, and love are not our only pitfalls, and Rivera's poems examine our more mundane fralities as well, lust, jealousy, failure, and aging.

The title poem, dedicated to his grandmother, encapsulates the poetic exigency of the collection, "It also gnaws at me, this/presence/absence; nothing that is/not nothing." It is here in Rivera's dialogue with Wallace Stevens, in his dialogue with his grandmother, and in his dialogue with his own spirit that expresses what has become so essential in American letters, loss. That intangible, sometimes romantic, sometimes sad, sometimes painful inbetween place in our inner lives.

Rivera's poems tease us, not in a mischeivous way either, but in an honest, earnest way, as if he is saying, what do I know of our "diminishment?" In the poem of the same name Rivera's voice reminds us that he too cannot "work it out." But he is, like us dear reader, willing to wonder is age and loss illuminates our spirit, our inner lives. "Why else invent these reveries?"