Forever

In Forever, a riveting collection by James Longenbach, the speaker reflects on the trajectory of a long life through what we might call an allegory of the everyday that perpetually contemplates the paradox of existence. The masterful sequence "Song of the Sun" tells the story of a man’s life—conceiving children and watching them grow, experiencing the evolution of love with a partner, and death—through epic tropes and cosmological imagery. The second poem in this sequence is a stunning account of a woman giving birth:

From her body came forth another body not
More beautiful but beautiful
in a different way.

The male speaker is awed by what he cannot comprehend and turns to metaphysics:

But when this happened
Again, it had never
Happened before.

While reading this collection, I at first resisted Longenbach’s lineation, but I eventually came to appreciate the poet’s technique of presenting ordinary turns of phrase in lines that cause us to see the words anew. In the excerpt above, line breaks create a series of juxtapositions: "happened / again" and "never / happened" that amplify the paradox at hand, drawing our attention to the ways in which what we experience as new has always already happened, and what feels like recurrence is itself always also fundamentally new. Across the poems assembled here, we are reminded that every moment is its own eternity, or, as the speaker states, "to collaborate / In the project of becoming" means "always / To have begun."