"Not Marble Nor the Guilded Monuments..."

Richard Sinay has built a book around a single, durable obsession: time, and what words can do against it. The title and the opening Sonnet 55 set up the anti-mutability argument, and the poems that follow keep it. The book is also a lifetime in sequence. Poems dated from 1968 to 2021 are sorted into six parts, so the reader moves from a twenty-one-year-old counting his springs to a seventy-seven-year-old writing the introduction. That structure is the book's real achievement.

The strongest poems fuse the Shakespearean frame with lived particulars. "Time Will Not Let Me" pushes against mortality with a pocket full of sand and a blue pen. "A Poem of Allusions for Gary" is the most moving piece here. The speaker wanders Lowe's looking for something to hold a tree to a stake while his brother clings to life, and the poem then moves through Dylan Thomas, Donne, Wilder, Hamlet and Macbeth. Literature becomes the vocabulary of grief rather than a display of learning, and the "Brief Candle" echo from Macbeth ties back to Sinay's own earlier poem. "Elegy for Pat Hadley" honors a teacher and climber in plain, warm lines. The Introduction adds candor, with a poet admitting "I am not Emily Dickinson. Nor Robert Frost," and that humility makes the generosity of the work easy to trust.

The book is for retired English teachers, Shakespeare devotees, and anyone who has kept an old notebook of youthful verses. For them, its honest, sometimes rough record of a life lived inside literature is exactly the point.