About No Time for Death
Welcome to a world where there is no time for death. It is a place and a state of mind, both for the temporal and the spiritual with space for the mundane and the extraordinary. “No Time for Death” is Harris Gardner’s fourth published collection; it is his first in fifteen years. This poetry collection is divided into three sections: An Argument with Time; Contemplating Mortality Instead of My Navel; and Negotiating for An Afterlife. These are serious poems with an undercurrent of humor pervading many of them. The subject matter spans the spectrum of the human condition imbued with faith, hope, and the occasional flicker of regret. It is engaged with the busy-ness of living. “No Time for Death” offers an overarching theme: Take a breath, a revitalizing pause; as for Mortality, slow down; enjoy the most of each day-to-day. What’s the rush? Death can wait, can’t it?
About Harris Gardner
Harris Gardner is the poetry editor for Ibbetson Street. He is co-author of “Chalice of Eros” and author of “Lest they Become” and “Among Us.” He has been published in numerous literary journals including The Harvard Review, Constellations, Wilderness House Literary Review, Muddy River Poetry Review and others. He is co-founder of Tapestry of Voices and The Boston National Poetry Month Festival. He is the recipient of the Lifetime Achievement Award from Ibbetson Street Press. Harris is also co-founder of the reading series, the First and Last Word Poetry Series.
To Purchase
Červená Barva Press
No Time for Death by Harris Gardner
$18.00, 82 pages, paper
ISBN: 978-1-950063-59-8
Publication Date: February 2022
Praise for No Time for Death
No Time for Death is just the right title for this lovely collection that uses poignant wit and deep feeling to fend off mortality in the only way that poems know how: by keeping time alive in breathing lines. I admire the combination of playful, ebullient imagination and steady, formal restraint in these ranging meditations on transience. There are also some extremely moving poems about Gardner’s Jewish heritage. And then there’s Gardner’s intuitive grasp of the instructive way that language, by its punctuated structure, keeps reminding us of our human predicament, even as it continues beyond the end-stopped lines.
—George Kalogeris, author of Dialogos (Antilever Press) and Camus: Carnets (Pressed Wafer Press)
Harris Gardner’s collection, No Time for Death, is sharply aware of mortality. How do we understand the passing of time, and our place in it? How do we come to terms with the certain knowledge that our lives will end? Although these are questions without answers, Gardner, in a poem like “Entreaty to the Trees” finds a way forward through the recognition of the world’s healing beauty. The trees exhale “that we may breathe”, and they nourish us with their “full blown fruit”. They, and we, are sacred parts of the whole.
—Jennifer Barber, Founding Editor, Salamander author of Works on Paper (Word Works)
Harris Gardner’s new collection of poems is a contemporary memento mori, a sustained reflection on our mortality. These poems show us many surprising ways the awareness of death insinuates itself into our daily thoughts and most private feelings. With wry and humane wit, Gardner presents us with poetic spells or rituals that do not deny death as much as they put it in its place. Like Dylan Thomas and John Donne before him, Gardner is fully intent on showing us how death shall have in the end no dominion, and that it too will die. When one is committed to life, these poems say, there really is no time for death.
—Fred Marchant, author of Said Not Said (Graywolf Press)