Now Before and Ever

Now Before and Ever goes the title, unpunctuated to keep the temporal perpetual, just as life itself flows on without interruption; and just as this extraordinary book so exactingly demonstrates in poem after beautiful poem, each one a time capsule of poignancy and visceral memory. "The poem is a teacher / like earth it sings / mysteries into the skin," Holly Guran writes in the introductory poem. And everywhere that lyric instruction is driven palpably home with enormous subtlety and a profoundly heartfelt understanding of human limitations. In "Broken Lines" two voices speak across an ungraspable gap in the center of the page: "She and I walk on cups / feel porcelain shatter and cut. // We retrace, look for a pattern. / What did I say, was there a better way? ...// She misses her brother. / I miss my son." The lines break up-and then reconfigure themselves on the page in the silent tracery of mutual pain that leaves us walking on familiar and familial eggshells, yet fortified by every unflinching moment.

-George Kalogeris, author of Winthropos



Now Before and Ever reads like a love story. The lover, by turns expectant, ecstatic, bewildered, is steadied by her "team of flora and fauna." In Guran's poems, "the soil's integrity" is easily misread as the soul's integrity, so knitted are the two in this collection. With love and deep regard for the natural world, for family, for fellow humans and all creatures, this work acknowledges what disappoints and celebrates what sustains. The reader feels akin to the speaker in "Fallen Sleet," "After a sermon on miracles, I'm ready to cross the icy street."

-Mary Buchinger, author of Virology and Navigating the Reach



The poems in Now Before and Ever can truly be said to be visionary in the way they transform what might seem to be ordinary observations of a plant, a place, or a person into luminous and moving portraits. Each time I read one of the poems, it reveals more of its depth and resonance, or as the poet writes, "like earth it sings mysteries into the skin."

-Dorothy Derifield, author of Zero Plus Time