House of days

the long version

In House of Days, his fourth collection of poems, Jay Parini moves beyond his earlier work to address the environmental and spiritual crises that afflict us in the late twentieth century. The book moves from "Nature Revisited," an elegiac sequence of poems about the ontological status of nature itself, to the title sequence, "House of Days," which might be thought of as the poet's field notes as he moves through a hypothetical season, month by month, creating a "web of words, / this still-becoming / text that's spun to catch whatever falls.". "The Ruined House" is an autobiographical sequence that revisits scenes from Anthracite Country (1982), Parini's acclaimed second volume of verse. From there, Parini moves through a series of spiritual explorations in "Another Kingdom," summoning "what I have done / or left undone, my desultory sins" as well as moments of vision, where he "waited and was met.". In a highly inventive final sequence, "Reading Emerson in My Forty-seventh Summer," Parini meditates on many of the great themes of Emerson - the quintessential American visionary - often blending his own language with quotations from Emerson.