No More Time

""No More Time" considers how humans, especially in the Western world, have seen ourselves as both a part of and apart from the natural environment. The long sequence "A Field Guide to People" offers a medieval-style alpha-bestiary of twenty-six sonnets, each a meditation on a species of flora or fauna that is thriving, endangered, or extinct. Evoking a kind of earthly heaven, purgatory, and hell for animals and plants, Greg Delanty stresses that the states of decline and disappearance evident throughout the natural world stem mainly from the actions of humans. These poems of the underworld function also as love poems to the creatures and plants, connecting the past with the present. Amid this sonnet sequence, Delanty places a series of epigrams, acrostics, and concrete poems addressing the subject of global warming with a balance of pathos and wit. Where the twentieth century began with the portrayal of human plight as living in a fragmented world, separate from each other and all around, "No More Time" shows that the early decades of the twenty-first find the world deeply connected and at risk"--