Then Back Again to Now is available for ordering from Broadstone Books.
Advance Comment:
I like the clarity of Tim Hunt’s voice, the overlaying of memory and the present, the seeing and re-seeing, the outward and inward gaze finding the key details that bring a scene and a character to life. These are poems that call for a doubletake, especially after one has read a few of them and seen how they work together and build on one another.
—Greg Pape, former Montana Poet Laureat, author of A Field of First Things, and others
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Tim Hunt writes aptly about growing up in small-town 1950s-60s California. His poems highlight his compassion for this rural community: friends, family members, as well as Japanese Americans in the nearby Manzanar internment camp where 110,000 were once held. He imagines their losses and fears, walking through its ruins. He also details with precision the atrocities in the Viet Nam war. Though loss is a theme, lightness is a quiet force in many of the poems. Hunt sees light as a voice in the desert that says “nothing at all— / and everything;” a boy’s family’s evening of storytelling as he drowses “in the lamp-shaded light / of the voices” on a winter night; moonlight which suggests “its light is not his father’s light;” and “…this war is wrong. That I am right / and that conscience is real—some inner/light….” Light’s physical presence here leads to awakenings, lifting memories from the darkest edges of the past. Even the poems’ structures appear to be light with the poet’s use of white space, one-line stanzas, creating pauses that give a sense of deep thought.
—Jan Minich, author of Coming into Grace Harbor
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Then Back Again to Now, is, as the title promises, Tim Hunt’s exploration of time and memory, like the “real” road that was there before they built the interstate, that new road that “pushes north past the little towns / as if they aren’t there.” That’s where the people live, though, in those little towns that Hunt brings alive for us, with their regulars at the café who all share their same history and the same songs, “Strangers in the Night” and “Little Girl Blue” that they sing together at the karaoke bar. Some of us remember, as Hunt does, “when we were so sure / that all that mattered was injustice / as we wondered what to burn to make us free.” In these newly troubled times, we should be grateful to be reminded of when freedom and justice mattered to us, and also of the earlier time when, to our shame, we sent those who didn’t look like us, who were born across the ocean, to camps like Manzanar where they were at the mercy of the desert and the guards. Even if memory is really the desire for memory, as Hunt also says, we need to hear those stories again, and think about what stories will be told of us.
—Susanna Lang, author of Like This and the forthcoming collection, This Spangled Dark