By Tess Taylor
April 26, 2019
DOOMSTEAD DAYS
By Brian Teare
“To praise this, blame that, / Leads one subtly away from the beginning, where / We must stay, in motion.” This quote from John Ashbery’s “Houseboat Days” anchors Teare’s latest volume, a book about climate change, apocalypse and grief, but also a book Teare composed while walking. In wandering, his poems deliberately cultivate attentiveness to the motions of mind. Unfurling, in poem after poem, Teare’s long hikes range from California and the Point Reyes coastline to Philadelphia, where he now teaches at Temple University. They are alternately rural and urban, tender and apocalyptic, written in the face of oil spills and also under a “raptor’s / accurate shadow / falling over me always / premonitory.” Teare’s forms often jag across the page, capturing an essayistic consciousness in staggered strokes of thought.