96 pp,  ISBN: 978-1904130-54-3, £8.99 (paperback only),  
Publication, 1 March 2013

Post-free for on-line credit/debit card orders

I wish to buy this book

 

A note about This Time Tomorrow In This Time Tomorrow, Matthew Thorburn searches for his own particular answers to some fundamental questions: Why do we travel? Why seek out new places and cultures, only to have to leave them? Whether writing about Japan, China or Iceland, Thorburn brings his sharp eye and musical ear to the poet's work: honoring with words the mysteries and wonders – life's essential strangeness – to be found in whatever landscape we choose to wander.

A note on Matthew Thorburn Matthew Thorburn is the author of two previous books of poems, Subject to Change and Every Possible Blue, and a chapbook, Disappears in the Rain. He is the recipient of a Witter Bynner Fellowship from the Library of Congress, as well as fellowships from the Bronx Council on the Arts and the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. His poems have appeared in journals such as The Paris Review, Michigan Quarterly Review and Ploughshares, and he has contributed essays and book reviews to Jacket, Pleiades, Rowboat: Poetry in Translation and other journals. He lives in New York City.   Visit Matthew Thorburn's own website

Praise for This Time Tomorrow “Matthew Thorburn’s This Time Tomorrow takes us on a journey of self-discovery – a physical journey over Icelandic water turned to barbaric glass by volcanic eruptions and, at the same time, a saga of Japan merging with memories of Asian things past – all cast in his particular calligraphic script. He cites Basho’s unhappiness at being ‘in Kyoto’ while, at the same time, ‘longing for Kyoto.’ Thorburn seems to lament that wherever he is physically, mentally he is elsewhere. Perhaps this is the indirectly stated point of his saga: Wherever we are we are not. Why not?” – Stanley Barkan “Matthew Thorburn’s poems chronicle both what we think we’re looking for and how we look – a bittersweet journey that underscores our inability to stay, or be, in any one place for more than its moment, thus engaging what it means to be here at all. But if mistaking a billboard of Mt. Fuji for Mt. Fuji itself names the inauthentic in the search for the authentic, Thorburn’s poems also tell us wonderfully that a plastic leaf falling can allow us to hear birds singing. Because, finally, what his journey reveals is the desire that lies both with and as the source of artifice, the true feeling only encountered by taking our chances with the fleeting landscape of the heart.” – Maxine Scates “This Time Tomorrow contains some of the best travel poems being written today. In vivid and surprising accounts of his travels, Thorburn’s eye for particulars never lets him down. He is a master of simultaneous action and perception. A dog-sled driver in Iceland rates equal billing with what the poet sees on the dog-sled ride, and the realities of present-day tourism become part of the story: ‘we sipped / instant coffee while he waited / for our Visa to go through.’ Gloria, disappointed in love in Kyoto, is as important as the famous temples and hermitages there. Matthew Thorburn is smart, alert and always good company on the road.” – Richard Tillinghast “Matthew Thorburn’s This Time Tomorrow is a series of travelogues that are simultaneously internal and external. Though the poems are set in Iceland, Japan and China, and rich with fresh imagery of those places, his real subject is ‘the built-in sadness of travel,’ with ‘sadness’ conjuring the innate interiority of being in foreign lands. Like Basho he chronicles the way that passing through the physical world with genuine curiosity and openness can cause sudden rifts to open, yielding profound glimpses into human consciousness. In a voice that is inventive, natural, honest and always clear, Matthew Thorburn has given us an exciting extended meditation on what it means to study the ever-surprising geography of one’s own mind.” – Chase Twichell

From This TIme Tomorrow   Pylsur – Reykjavík That’s a hot dog with fried onions (the kind that come in a can) and stripes of brown mustard and mayo. We each ate one standing outside the metal shack down by the harbor. It’d become a tourist site – seriously, a green bus pulled up; and after all we were there, weren’t we? – after Bill Clinton stopped by for a pyls and a Coke a few years back. They have his picture up over the register. He must have done what we did – turned around slowly till the wind blew at his back and watched the whale watchers straggling back in off the boat, gray-faced in their yellow and blue slickers, glanced past them to the Esso station – odd how it’s the best place to get your hands on cups of yogurty skyr, the ones with the smart folding spoons tucked under the lids – and wondered why are gas stations also often restaurants here, the only lights on in the smaller towns, and felt secretly happy about this country’s love of burgers and dogs, pizza, fries dipped in remoulade, even if a hot dog sets you back seven bucks (he wouldn’t have cared, or even known) because everything’s shipped in and trucked around, until the wind turns around again so you do too, and wolf down your last two bites. ©   Knock Don’t linger over the colors of flowers. They die too. The river cuts around rocks, scrapes its toothy blade along its flanks. In a thousand, ten thousand years, this will be a gully, a ravine. And there are seeds picked up, carried by birds, dropped far from here and so, soon, these trees grow there too. Buson said leaves fall and so they fell as his lover went away. The yawning space between two trees is a door. Knock and it swings open. ©