Seconds

For six months, Philip V of Spain remained in his room, suffering from deep melancholia. Obsessed with time and mortality, he surrounded himself with clocks, their regular motions helping to keep the madness at bay. Then one evening, from just outside his window, he heard the voice of the castrato Farinelli singing an aria by Hasse. The music so soothed him that he summoned Farinelli to sing the aria nightly for the next two years. The aria's words wind through Linda Bierds's new...
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For six months, Philip V of Spain remained in his room, suffering from deep melancholia. Obsessed with time and mortality, he surrounded himself with clocks, their regular motions helping to keep the madness at bay. Then one evening, from just outside his window, he heard the voice of the castrato Farinelli singing an aria by Hasse. The music so soothed him that he summoned Farinelli to sing the aria nightly for the next two years. The aria's words wind through Linda Bierds's new collection and out through the centuries, passing in their journey two dozen lives, real and imagined. They are vulnerable, triumphant, injured, mortal. Aware of the body as a frail container for the soul, they wait together like seconds in some grand duel between time and immortality. In this new work, Bierds looks at 'seconds' in all its meanings as particles of time, as stand-ins for someone else's battles, as damaged goods. The poems in The Seconds link one to another through imagery, language, and metaphor, but it is the richness of imagination that makes them haunting.