Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #2969257 in Books
• Published on: 2008-03-14
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 92 pages

From the Publisher
John FitzGerald's Telling Time by the Shadows is an unusually frank confrontation with God. FitzGerald's poems challenge the emptiness of the universe, questioning how we can intuit God's presence in the shadows.

About the Author
A dual citizen of the United States and Ireland, John M. FitzGerald is a poet and attorney in Los Angeles. He attended UCLA and the University of West Los Angeles School of Law, where he was editor of the Law Review. His poems have been published in numerous journals and anthologies. Spring Water, a novel in verse, was a Turning Point Books prize selection in 2005. Telling Time by the Shadows is his second book of poetry. His other collections include The Mind, The Charter of Effects, Question Creation and The Zeroth Law. He recently completed his first novel, Primate, and turned it into a screenplay. He has lived in England and Italy, and currently resides in Santa Monica.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
From "Prayer:"

Now, I stare into emptiness,
alone enough for poetry,
alone enough for even me,
alone requiring mention of passing.

There are these words, a sound,
an order, evasive emotions
I've known so long, just not acknowledged.
But others begin to notice frozen souls.

I don't know why I seem surprised.
I'm making life happen, I let it run wild.
I ought to rein it in a little,
maybe do some real work.

Give me that alpha rhythmic vibe
and I'll go one-on-one with God.
God is not too busy for people like me.
I say, you are no God without me.

Customer Reviews

TELLING TIME BY THE SHADOWS, a beautiful and stunning collection of poems of love and longing
John M. FitzGerald's TELLING TIME BY THE SHADOWS is an extraordinary and brilliant
collection of poems of love and longing, written at the dawn of a relationship.
A very intimate and deeply moving book, it is a testament to FitzGerald's incredibly
wide range. His first collection, Spring Water, a novel in verse about the mental of
a serial killer, could not be more different.
These are stirring poems written from the heart in the form of prayer:

From "Prayer"

Now, I stare into emptiness,
alone enough for poetry,
alone enough for even me,
alone requiring mention of passing.

There are these words, a sound,
an order, evasive emotions
I've known so long, just not acknowledged.
But others begin to notice frozen souls.

I don't know why I seem surprised.
I'm making life happen, I let it run wild.
I ought to rein it in a little,
maybe do some real work.

Give me that alpha rhythmic vibe
and I'll go one-on-one with God.
God is not too busy for people like me.
I say, you are no God without me.


In "Talking to Rilke", FitzGerald writes:

I see you know loneliness, wanting not just words,
but verse to sprinkle mystery on the breeze
and feed the page, as if every moment
is observed and respected for its holiness.

So we, the readers, are left breathless and wanting more.
This is a haunting, timeless collection that you will want to read time and again.

Helene Cardona, author of The Astonished Universe

Poetry par excellence
Without exception poetry pulls a person out of their cognitive and emotional equilibrium, and given that, it is never surprising to find that poetry is always surprising. It is always innovative and as such, refreshing. It is the antithesis of the conservative, always forsaking and rejecting the past. It is conceptual blending at its best, and in poetry the reader can extract exclusively and arbitrarily from the written text. Pure anarchy of thought is possible, even desirable.

This book is poetry par excellence. Within its pages, the reader can lay his beliefs on their deathbed, greet the author with a translated handshake, with the translation possibly indiscernible and idiosyncratic. The reader can find herself stranded in the text, and never to be saved purely by a tale, but can find his path via the author's paved mental roads. The reader can gasp for breath as if drowning, not in water but in words, but there is always just enough air, and the reader's feelings can be momentarily suspended, only to find them again hyperactive and delightfully out of control. With the book covers open and the pages turning the reader's feelings will be a combinatorics of sensations, arbitrarily entangled with each other, and will encounter an effective statistical sample of the uncountable cardinality of (poetic) truths, and will be blown by strong symbolic winds from one mood to another.