A Truce With Fantasy

Bill Mayer is a master of the plain style. His writing moves at the pace of breathing, of walking, of slow, caressive speech to build a poetry richly faithful to our sensate and physical life, as here in one of his many poems of camping in the desert: “Feeling the expected fear rise up in me as the light fades / from the last clouds to the west. Looking east / to the deep purple, and black outlines of mountains. / The wind quieting. Letting the fear leak out / beyond the little pool of light into the darkness.” He lovingly sifts that life, asking the questions of shape, value, limit, finding in poem after poem those points where the physical merges across to the spiritual: “Human misery is a constant. / If we could perfect the brain, / re-wire it to allow us the happiness we deserve, / would that be a good thing?”
—Richard Silberg, author of The Horses, New and Selected Poems
Bill Mayer is writing some of the most powerful, intelligent, and serious poems of any poet I’ve been reading in the last few years. —Joseph Stroud, author of Of This Earth, New and Selected Poems
Bill Mayer’s A Truce With Fantasy is a collection of exceptional beauty and probity. Despite their gentle insistence on looking directly at what assails us—be it time, the body’s impermanence, the inevitable repetition of hope and despair—these poems are infused with an enduring faith in the possibility of one means or another of regeneration. Breath, birdcall, dawn in the desert, a spider in his backyard studio: Mayer’s answer to the question Does the I last? is an intimate naming of the things of this world. His eye is that of the photographer he is: clear, precise, and scrupulously attentive to detail. His voice is restrained, thoughtful, and humble; yet it carries the authority of one who has lived deeply and felt deeply. Mayer’s vision is consistently pervaded by his closeness to the wild, the natural world, and—though grounded, understated—there is a radiant presence in these poems of reverence and mystery.
—Anita Barrows, author of Exile