Mercury Hour

In this book-length poem, Alsop writes beautifully distilled stanzas that intertwine passion and grief for the worlds within our world that are disappearing. Amplifying the book's graceful four-line stanzas are Alsop's drawings-moon phases, concentric circles, and astronomical diagrams-that deepen the collection's atmosphere of dream and meditation.

For all its attention to brokenness and counterpoint, Mercury Hour ultimately affirms poetry's power-through dream, trance, and mystical vision-to restore what has vanished.

In these poems there is a spirit that is resilient and thriving. Mercury Hour evokes a central question: Can loss be a guiding light across time, space, and the fractured landscape of the heart? Alsop charts a tumultuous, yet triumphant, terrain that draws strength from celestial bodies making dust and ash into “a new jewel” where even the “dirt will bloom.” We are reminded that we can coexist with grief, in these wondrous poems the heart is moored, and the spirit learns to flourish.

 —Ruben Quesada, author of Brutal Companion

 The poems of Maureen Alsop’s Mercury Hour hold such a wonderful meditative ease and slowness, a silence and a precision of language and narrative threads. Composed as a book of silence, Mercury Hour is a book-length suite, set as a singular assemblage of meditative lyric, held as a series of layers, wave upon wave. An unfurling, if you will. Accompanied by illustrations, Alsop’s poems achieve a wisdom, a whisper, of quietude that simultaneously provides a propulsive, engaged lyric. This collection will be the envy of any poet smart enough to open it.

 —rob mclennan, author of the book of sentences

Mercury Hour beckons from the deepest wellsprings of conscious ness, where immersion finds only ephemeral peace. Streams traverse the poignant syllables of this collection, trickling over arcane signifiers and beyond those mourned fulfillments sealed hermetically from reason. Its divinations are frantic yet gentle. They serve as unrequited ritual: the purest desire for thaumaturgic deliverance. In these verses, the boundless flows outward from the sensuous. There is torment and then restoration, but also disillusionment. The exploratory spirit plunges into liminal abysses before discovering new momentum in atmospheres, fires, and harvested ash dusts. The expanses are formidable, and yet this soothing voice persists. Alsop’s incantations pull us deeper through the sweetness and torment of love, death, and resurgence. The signifiers reshape into hollows to be occupied momentarily, burned away, and then repurposed. There is the cosmic glimmer of being Here and Elsewhere all at once, of residing within oneself, whilst scraping against the interior: a spirit relentlessly in transformation.

 —Ashim Shanker, author of trenches parallax leapfrog

Mercury Hour: this is what poetry is for . . . to recover the sensation of life . . . to hold the hand of all that it births to guide tears back to the creek, hearts back to their chests, sailors back to their warm boats, their warm wives, their warm wanderings . . . These poems are an internal rain rivering towards light, then more light, then even more. Yet they are filled by the silence that comes when there is internal singing . . . Filled with the yearning, the sorrow, the mother and the bread, and the streets and the soldiers, and the cloying and the hope that wheezes in and through and amongst all things, at all times.

 —Eartha Davis, author of màthair beinn