A Loose Rendering

What does it mean to think of time and memory loosely? T.P. Bird's work helps us answer that question. He divides his fifty "renderings" into three sections-"Time & Memory"; "Poets, Presidents and Me," and "Other Considerations." In the first, his metaphors evoke a gently self-mocking nostalgia--for a Saturday trip to a barbershop, a boyhood leap into a leaf pile, a young soldier's time in Bavaria.... Old memories become road trips into his father's past, and his grandfather's. Comfortably familiar metaphors-ice, gnarled trees, burning leaves, stone walls, full moons-code an aging man's values as he loosely reshapes a past which "never leaves you, and which you never leave." In his second section, Bird aligns his life's path with the works and days of presidents and poets. Fourteen presidents, from Truman to Biden, and 67 poets, from Walt Whitman to Mary Oliver, stand as guideposts marking his path into and through American culture. In his final group of poems, "Other Considerations," existential questions about time, space, memory, and meaning become whimsical word puzzles, image-fests, and philosophical debates, leading to a genuine appreciation for the beauty of the natural world and a deep, albeit cautious, faith in a creator. As the book's first poem concludes: "If you knew the yearnings \ of aging men-you would \ hold them in your heart and \ know that your stories are soon \ to follow."