Modern Ancient

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In Timothy Dodd’s poetry collection, ancient knowledge comes together to assist our disconnection with everyday experience in modern times. Following Neruda’s tradition in Alturas de Macchu Picchu, a journey to origin to enlighten the present, Dodd proposes writing as archeology for emotion. The poetic image connects us with past realities, allowing ancient light to assist our return to a conscious experience of the present. Modern Ancient acts as a vortex that links everyday adventures with a sense of transcendence. To invigorate this path, Dodd visits different textual strategies and registries. He also takes from his background as a visual artist to create writing that is always concrete and powerful.

---Andrea Cote, author of La Ruina que nombro and Chinatown a toda hora y otros poemas

In Modern Ancient, Timothy Dodd creates a landscape of time, the “timescape” implied in the title. Dodd writes a poetry of movement by mixing and arranging poems from a distinct palette of formal approaches. The narrative of the book flows backwards while the poems move in and out from symmetric quartets in soft enjambments to dislocations of words across the page. This is how Dodd empties time from place: by creating a sense of nomadic poetry that travels and expresses the sense of chaos and alienation. In the end, Dodd finds us seeking codes of meaning as we transit through the realm of affects, the dwelling place of poetry, where everything could be good and better.

---Elidio La Torre Lagares, author of Wonderful Wasteland and other natural disasters