Running Out of Words

for Afterwards

Lush and allusive, tuned to a background in translating Nepal Bhasa poetry, Running Out of Words for Afterwards gives voice to cycles of desire, loss, and renewal. Like the many rivers that flow through this book, David Hargreaves’ poems, in various turns, can be urgent, expansive, unpredictable, or calm, conveying the reader through landscapes both mystical and mundane, through illusions of selfhood, and the struggles of language to accept its own limitations.

Praise for

Running Out of Words

for Afterwards

In Running Out of Words for Afterwards, David Hargreaves listens long and longingly to a moribund world, translating as he does so an ocean’s littered tideline into verse, a dove’s call into a chance hymn, the flames of cremation into a whole language of destruction and rebirth;rather than a source of pride for the speaker of these poems though, this listening, this translating, becomes a source of humility and awe: “Turns out I’ve misread the shadows, / lost track of noon, missed my bus, so I text // my friend meet at The Doomed,” Hargreaves writes in “No One’s Land,” a potent meditation on the tangled relationship between identity and revision, threat and intimacy, written language and time itself. Moving deftly in and out of lyric, narrative, and meditative modes, Hargreaves’s poems proffer a world that, like his speaker, "thirsts for release"--a world that is constantly, perhaps even ecstatically, ceasing to be itself and, in so doing, revising the lives of all who dwell in it.

—Devon Walker-Figueroa, author of Philomath

What I enjoy in David Hargreaves’ poems is the freshness and authenticity of their vision, the subtlety of the language, and above all the abiding curiosity of the consciousness that is expressed through them. Open and alive to spiritual sublimities without attempting to force them, these poems record Hargreaves’ forays into the ineffable and unknowable, his ongoing attempt to understand and come to terms with a mysterious, frequently chaotic and sometimes threatening world. This poet, one comes to feel, is on a continuing journey, and this very enjoyable book is, ultimately, an invitation to become a fellow traveler.

—Troy Jollimore, author of Tom Thomson in Purgatory and Syllabus of Errors

In the opening poem to this astonishing collection, David Hargreaves details the sounds and smells of morning, then asks: “Do you wonder as I do / is all this connected?” The poem swiftly follows that question with another: “Do you wonder / is anything not?” In a world short on answers and long on conflicts, this book provides solace and joy. Paired with the poems’ insights into mindfulness is an intense scrutiny of language that serves as a bridge to both connection and disconnection. Hargreaves is especially skilled at quick sonic juxtaposition, surprising metaphors, and etymological connections to the unconscious. With keen observations into the intimations of the natural world and the reflective mind, these poems hum with an understanding of the beauty behind impermanence. A truly exquisite book of poems.

—Charlotte Pence, author of Many Small Fires and Code

David Hargreaves’ mind and heart animate Running Out of Words for Afterwards. The suffix –‘wards’ of the book’s title suggests not only the period of time after “running out of words,” perhaps as drought follows running-out-of-water, but also, one hopes, a return to beginnings: the possibility of renewal after the discourse of “the end.” Hargreaves brings to his poems a critical intelligence as a translator and linguist as well as a musical and emotional dexterity; the poet and the figures of these poems pursue their exchanges in a charged atmosphere of personal, cultural and ecological crisis. Still, the book’s quietest moments show how it is possible to find a sensibility and vocabulary responsive to upheaval and change.

—Ed Skoog, author of Travelers Leaving the City