Now Then

From across the Sierras to the Caribbean to the backyard minutiae of “home,” these poems travel through time and place.

Arranged in four movements—Summer, Autumn, Winter, and Spring—this collection reads like a yearlong meditation, each season a chorus of voices capturing the spirituality of landscape. The four poets first met in Donald Wesling’s class at UC San Diego in 1972. Nearly fifty years later, during the pandemic, they began exchanging poems in the spirit of the “Buddhist dailies” of Qing dynasty widows. From this renewed correspondence emerged a work that bridges decades.

Each poet contributes half a dozen poems to every season, their voices distinct yet intertwined, a conversation that traverses distance and memory with the subtle elegance of a string quartet. The Now of these pages, 2020 to 2024, resonates with the Then of the years between 1972 and 2020, revealing how friendship, art, and attention to the natural world deepen with time.