The Temporary

Cline’s The Temporary, though a chapbook, has scope. It packs a lot in a small space, which, in a sense, is the definition of poetry: a lot in a little or saying a lot in a few words. The subject matter is as broad as the Self, love, loss, time, and memory — how love and loss shape Self through time and memory. Passion is the fire in which the Self is shaped, and burnt to ash. Memory is either lost or dim and, since transient, is, in fact temporary. The ideal of love may be permanent, but different kinds of love are fleeting: a mother’s, a pet’s, a lover’s. Cline gives us fourteen contemporary sonnets carrying over the last line of a poem as the first line of the next, paralleling and emphasizing the idea that a series of unique selves gradually evolves or migrates through life in an overlapping cycle of emotional death and rebirth. One way he puts it is that the “flower seed is not the bud is not the blossom.” Another: “A man that was a boy sheds what was once himself.” The final sonnet weaves together thoughts and images from the prior floral wreath of poems on the transience of things.

—Ken Anderson, author of The Intense Lover: A Suite of Poems,  Someone Bought the House on the Island: A Dream Journal and Sea Change: An Example of the Pleasure Principle

Available here!