Kintsugi

In Kintsugi, Thomas Meyer has written an intimate elegy for his partner of nearly four decades. As Robert Kelly observes in his foreword, this is "a text written in and through the very death it mourned." Kintsugi is a Japanese word meaning "golden joinery," and it describes the practice of repairing pottery with gold lacquer. As Kelly suggests, "the very rupture is what is highlighted": Meyer's presence to the loss, in the midst of daily life and its attendant concerns, serves as "the golden line that holds all this together." Likewise, his supple poetic line joins formal lament with the quiet spontaneity of thinking. The result is poetry of deep grief and wonder: "Walk into a room. / Not know where I am. / Once it was Love / had me so distracted. / Now it's Death."

About the Author :

Thomas Meyer was born and raised in Seattle and graduated from Bard College, where he studied under Robert Kelly. There he met Jonathan Williams and joined his nonprofit publishing enterprise the Jargon Society for the next forty years as life partner, helpmate, and custodian, editing, producing, and designing fifty some titles. Together they spent part of each year in the Yorkshire Dales and mountains of western North Carolina. Meyer is the author of many books of poetry and translation. He has received an NEA Creative Fellowship in Poetry, an Ingram-Merrill Award for Poetry, and an NEA Opera & Music Theater (New American Works) Creative Fellowship for Librettists. Poems of his have been set to music by Craig Carnahan, James Sellars, and Conrad Cummings.

"The intermingling of substances and moments, here one minute, gone the next, is bound together in the title of Thomas Meyer's Kintsugi, which takes its title from a Japanese word that describes the mending of shattered ceramics with a lacquer mixed with gold . . . Meyer's short, spare phrases read like water droplets on a pane, clear and clean . . . If language is an expression of mourning, and poetry a heightened attention to language, then the poem that sets out specifically to commemorate loss finds itself uncannily confronted by its own nature, as if faced with its reflection in a convex mirror."--Gillian Osborne, The Believer

"A memorial to poet and publisher Jonathan Williams, Thomas Meyer's partner of almost forty years, Kintsugi is a particularly moving example of elegy as a registration of the wound dealt by death to an erotic epistemology."--Brian Teare, On the Seawall