For Now, We Have Been Spared
124 pages
March 25, 2025
Written during the first three “Covid Years,” For Now, We Have Been Spared is a collection of complex sequences and carefully constructed shorter poems that reflect the uncertainty of living through a pandemic—not only in terms of the immediate threats to the body, but also the tectonic shifts in how we perceive the nature of existence itself.
| Hardcover | ISBN 9781639821945 | $36.00 |
| Paperback | ISBN 9781639821938 | $19.00 |
| eBook | ISBN 9781639821952 | $12.99 |
on Goodreads
Written during the first three “Covid Years,” For Now, We Have Been Spared is a collection of complex sequences and carefully constructed shorter poems that reflect the uncertainty of living through a pandemic—not only in terms of the immediate threats to the body, but also the tectonic shifts in how we perceive the nature of existence itself.
The opening sequence—a sustained, metaphorical meditation on the devastation caused by the multiple deaths of a friend’s sons, sets a tone of elegiac reflection that runs throughout the collection. Near tragedies are paired with simple joys; sickness is mirrored by health; coming-of-age is followed by poems immersed in the experience of aging.
These are poems that carry the weight of decades of observation and experience. Their subjects range from the commonplaces of domestic life to the public realm of politics. What binds all of them together is their grounding in sensory detail. Extended narrative is present in nearly every poem. The subtle cadences of prose poetry also make their presence felt. These poems are set in particular, recognizable places and populated by everyday people who find themselves confronting trying circumstances. Always, though, hovering at the edge of perception, there remains the possibility of redemption and grace.
What Others Are Saying
Gary Fincke’s newest book is a marvel. He is a master of the two and three and even four subject poem, pitting the fragility of our bodies and dreams against time and history. As his title implies, what Gary Fincke knows all too well is our temporariness. And yet, as a dying friend says in one poem, there is “so much to love.” And love Fincke does. Not sloppily or sentimentally, but with the understanding that curiosity and intelligence lead us to the realm of the heart and the mystery of our lives. These wonderful poems have a generosity of spirit and the seemingly effortless craft of a masterful poet.
Robert Cording, author of In the Unwalled City
“Mark my words–history / is the home we never leave,” Gary Fincke writes in this remarkable collection, which guides us from cave paintings to glacier funerals, from storage locker auctions to silent cathedrals, from rural Pennsylvania to the Pleiades. Wrestling with some of the darker moments of both his personal experience and our collective past, Fincke’s poems give us insight into the crises of the present moment and our uncertain future. But through it all, undercurrents of hope run beneath this work.
Julie Danho O’Connell, author of Those Who Keep Arriving
In For Now, We Have Been Spared, Gary Fincke’s poems tell the stories of lives disrupted by tragedies both personal and public and yet continuing, exploring what joy and pleasure are like tinged with unbearable—yet borne—grief and pain and loss. These poems are a missive of love, and provide both solace and hope to help us deal with what we must, with “the burn of vanishing.”
George Looney, author of The Acrobatic Company of the Invisible
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