Literary Lives
Mutability and Mortality
Frederick Turner, Latter Days. Franciscan University Press, 160pp., $15 paper.
The equivocal title of Frederick Turner’s latest collection of poems calls attention to the rich web of associations that hold this luminous book together. Latter Days most pointedly denotes the last stages of a person’s life; the poet, not shying away from his circumstances, presents himself in “A Japan Journal, May 2018” as an “ancient primate” and “the old professor,” the personae that govern nearly every one of the poems. But “latter days” suggests more broadly the end-times of the planet. Many of the poems are composed in the context of the COVID pandemic, and Turner links his personal end-time to intimations of global catastrophe.
Finally, “latter day” carries the sense of someone or something that is a contemporary version of something from the past; Turner often depicts himself as “a live anachronism,” a latter-day poet. “I compose in cadences outworn,” he writes in “A ‘Sonnet’ for Leopardi,” self-consciously using forms and meters that are out of fashion and that, from the perspective of publishers and MFA programs, seem to belong to earlier eras. The poems of Latter Days are suffused with these personal, apocalyptic, and anachronistic senses of aging, existential threat, and traditionalist artistic choices—and often all three senses will be found harnessed together, as in the closing couplet of “Indian Summer”: “This is an old man’s poem, with plodding rhymes, / An Indian-summer poem, in troubled times.”
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