Literate, imaginative, erudite, precise, and lovely—the poems by Michael Minassian in 1000 Pieces of Time (Sheila-Na-Gig Editions 2025) are all that and more. Minassian blends the here and the gone, the realistic and the fanciful, the dreamy and the sharp, in a collection at once creative and impeccably well crafted. Divided into three distinctive parts, the book opens with time-traveling poems in which historical and classical figures are plunked down into today’s world. Part two is filled with poems that are more allusive and personal, while part three is rich with tales, dreams, and other delights. With his sly humor and an intellectual’s knowledge of the classics, mythology, and history, Minassian takes his readers on an exhilarating ride through these poems.
Many of the figures in Part One arrive in Minassian’s poems from classic literature or mythology. In “Achilles in the Underground,” Achilles rides the subway and scowls, “but this is the underground, / and he may not be the only one / who’s unhappy or dead.” Ophelia, in “The Hills of Memory,” is quoted as saying “trees deep dark green / stark against the disappearing gray / silhouetted like the hills of memory.” In the poem “Horatio Answers the Phone,” Hamlet is seen “in the Village dressed in black / hanging around Washington Square, / muttering about his dead father / and oversexed mom.” Cordelia, the legendary Queen of the Britons, in the modern world “found language / rusted on her tongue” in the poem “Silver Alert.”
The mythical and legendary characters in Part One also share the stage with historical figures. Emily Dickinson is a waitress at the Waffle House who asks the poet “[h]ave you found anything precious?” The answer offered in return is: “Half of poetry is language / the other half / the hollow part / of thought.” In a particularly poignant poem, “Elysian Fields,” Einstein and Newton meet and discuss matter and gravity. In Hiroshima, the bomb falls “for the precise time / Newton had predicted,” and children are “sucked up into the mushroom cloud / despite gravity, mass, or matter.” In “Rattling Locks,” Charles Dickens “thinks he hears his name / then a rustling like pages / turning by themselves.”
In Part Two, time is also a theme—among many topics. In “Past Lives,” Minassian writes:
Perhaps it is all an endless loop,
repeating the same events
across dimensions and strings
of time held tight and plucked
like an instrument tuned to a key
heard just beyond the horizon.
In his poem “To Turn Back Time,” a pandemic turns “the world as quiet / as a spider’s next move.” And in “Kemet,” the poet wakes in something like a dreamscape and holds hands with a woman with “the smell of time on our wrists.” While the poet’s mourning aunt in “The Cathedral of Time” smashes all the clocks when her husband dies, after the service, the poet “walked away / scattering broken / pieces of clocks, / like rice at a wedding / of time and death.”
Poems in Part Three include such sweet gems as “Desire,” in which a green-and-white hummingbird hovers over orchids, and the poet concludes:
Desire looks like this–
the brightest bloom,
the tug of air,
an eye in motion,
when everything
else is still.
In yet another of many gems in Part Three, in “Lunar Blues,” Minassian writes, “Moonlight covers us / like a fleeting thought.”
As illustrated by some of the above quotes, Minassian excels in similes—the spider’s next move, pages turning by themselves, silhouettes like the hills of memory. Indeed, these poems are often enhanced with crystalline images that become sharp, precise, full-bodied similes. For example, in “Unwinding the Past,” Minassian writes:
This afternoon, the sky turned
a deep shock of blue
like a swath of canvas
in a Renaissance painting
with gold-clad angels
and women with braided hair.
It isn’t just his enchanting similes, though, that make these poems so full and rich, but often the sheer fanciful magic within them. In the poem “Lilacs Come Undone,” the “dream is a slow waterfall,” and a friend brings “a bouquet of weeping women.” In “My Sister Dated Frankenstein,” when she breaks up with him after the prom, his “tears filled our backyard.” Then there’s the “naked man / with the head of a white ibis” mowing the lawn in the poem “Kemet.”
And if magic and similes weren’t enough, these poems are filled with sensory details that make them evocative and inviting. The “scent of warm bread to awaken the past” in “The View From the Bungalow,” the “heat in Vietnam” and “sound of the bat as it hits the ball” in “The Sweet Spot,” and the “scent of pollen” and the “humming noise” in the poem “I Will Speak for the Bees” are just a few of the sensual phrases in Minassian’s poems.
All in all, the poems in 1000 Pieces of Time are glorious, full, thoughtful, and delightful to read. Minassian’s imagination, knowledge, and talent all come together to create an expressive, fine collection of eloquence and magic.
Michael Minassian
A retired English professor from Florida, Michael Minassian writes, travels with his wife, and is an avid photographer. He is a former member of the English Department at Broward College in South Florida, where he was the director of an annual Screenwriting Film Festival and also wrote and produced the podcast series “Eye on Literature.” In addition, he studied and served as a guest tutor for ten years at Cambridge University’s Summer Study Program in the UK. His other poetry books include A Matter of Timing, Time Is Not a River, and Morning Calm, as well as a book of photos and several chapbooks of poems. He is currently a contributing editor for Verse-Virtual, an online poetry journal, and he lives in Georgia. For more information, visit: https://michaelminassian.com
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