In the poem that opens this, his ninth collection, one of our most celebrated men of letters contemplates the “primordial tensions” felt in the crashing waves of a Northeaster, the glory and terror of the storm as “the real comes crashing finally down on you.” Contemplating as we all must the unrelenting passing of time and the harsh realities of history, Paul Mariani embodies the filmmaker Akira Kurosawa’s dictum that “the artist is the one who does not look away.”

With Ordinary Time, his eighth collection, the distinguished poet and biographer Paul Mariani shares a vision of the world in which the sacred and the quotidian mingle, sometimes quietly and sometimes with revelatory force.