Publisher's Synopsis
"We must "relearn ourselves / with what we have now," Hilda Downer says in her new collection When Light Waits for Us. Time-in all its countless iterations and absences-bears in on her from every side, all of life an excavation site, a record of who she became and, more hauntingly, who she did not. Even so, Downer recognizes that we live in a "delicate microcosm" where "orchids [are] so specialized / their pollination requires / one particular species of insects." Her poems assert that we are no different, our souls intersecting, thereby giving us all these ways-music, photography, even poems-to "invent an art to make it worth starting over." Jeff Hardin"--.
