Day Unto Day

For several years, Martha Collins wrote several lines each day for one month each year. Day Unto Day brings together the first six of the resulting poetic sequences. With perfectly distilled lines, she captures the aching, liminal beauty of one day becoming another—the slow burn of time passing, the ambiguity of an “old / new leaf” turning over, even as she collages a wide range of material that includes often disturbing news of the world.

Reading Day Unto Day is like listening in on the meditations of a nimble, restless mind hurtling through time. Here, Martha Collins delves into the shiftiness of gender, the power of romantic love, the nature of the divine, and the certainty of mortality. Musically brilliant, psychologically intricate, movingly humane—Martha Collins is one of our most vital poets.”        —Kevin Prufer

There is a difference between poems and poetry and Martha Collins knows it.Day Unto Dayis a diary, a calendar, an artistic intervention taking the ordinary into the extraordinary for great generous intent–a quotidian preparation for human Being. Its pleasure is that of ‘attention’ and its attentions are intellectual, sonic, architectural and deeply spiritual.”   —Kazim Ali

Don’t let the title fool you: this is not your ordinary poetry of meditation or praise. The law of this book is attention; it is the ‘eye always open.’ Jean Valentine calls these poems ‘little lights which sometimes sound like prayer.’ Each spare, musical poem is indeed a “little light,” which Collins shines on the mundane, the philosophical, the political, and the cosmic.”    —Coal Hill Review   

Martha Collins’s elegant new sequence takes as its central premise the representation of the mind-in-time. It is lovely, important, central work, of an order of import like the 20^thcentury’s great meditations on time, from Hardy’s elegies to Eliot’sFour Quartets to Ammons’s  Tape for the Turn of the Year.”   —Pleiades  

          October 2004

1

Not much. Less. Slip
of a finger, diminished
interval, maybe third

of three or two.

Water mirrors house with high
green door opening out (no

steps) into pure air.

2

Air pockets three
hawks. Cat got
the bird got the cat.

Overflown. A habit
of flight. Worn cloud
on the edge of edge.

Wisps. Little tongues.

3

Tongues at work. Talk Today

She could did for an hour or more.

My first her, who gave me words.

Then at the end, before, merely Oh!

A moment of . . . of more, perhaps.

Oh sweet and blessèd could be.


Oh my soul

4

Soul slept, called in sick.

Late sun clouds
the lake with clouds.

Katydid down
to –did –did.

Nothing to be done.

Little sun, quarter moon.

5

Moon covered, un-
covered, covered again, cold.

Cold and hot, very and both.

Disturbed the Sea of Tranquility.

Distributed by the Moon Shop.

Distributed self in pieces.

Oh my broken.

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