Last Night I Aged a Hundred Years - Peter Grandbois - Bog

Poetry. Winner of the 2020 Richard Snyder Memorial Publication Prize, Selected by Indran Amirthanayagam. Peter Grandbois' LAST NIGHT I AGED A HUNDRED YEARS takes us on a winged journey beyond ourselves to the very lip of being, where identities blend and dissolve in their quest to 'lose the small in me.' Not content to witness and record, these talismanic verses invoke deep longing, conjuring a space where 'The spirit lives between / one name and another.' Grandbois' subtle and nuanced lines bear a silence that swells into utterance. 'We are the ones' he whispers, 'who dissolve into breath from moon to mouth...' Yet, while harkening to transcendence, these poems enact a sacrament to the sublunary, 'a meditation of mud' and 'brackish/grief' where creatures of all kinds--crows, frogs, foxes, spiders, and squirrels as well as 'hawks soaring with sun-forged feathers'--attest to the dreamlike fabric of existence. Tinctured with the wisdom of Rumi and the passion of Neruda, LAST NIGHT I AGED A HUNDRED YEARS is a book to savor--night, day, and always.--Phil Brady