Instructions at Sunset, by Geraldine Connolly, Terrapin Books, 2025.
Geraldine Connolly’s Instructions at Sunset is a marvelous paean to what it means to live life fully, and with urgency. A sunset can bless us with an exquisite visual experience at the end each day, but it’s also a metaphor to call our attention to the sinking of life, just as the sun drops below the horizon. (In another poem, she reminds us that “the whisper of death” is always present.) The metaphorical meanings of sunsets and the rising sun inform many of these poems. For instance, she signals the need to celebrate life while there’s time. “When the light turns the clouds pink . . . is the start of the title poem in this fifth full-length collection of her poems. In the same poem, she includes this subtle image from Exodus: “call out to the burning bush of light.” In another poem, “Gratitude,” she begins her poem, with its images of the desert, with “Each evening we watch the sun / preparing to leave the mountain,” and she ends this praise poem with “the sky’s pink and black pillars of fire.” Returning to the theme of the urgency of time, she explains in “Ars Poetica” that if she doesn’t “capture what’s happening in words, / it will disappear.” This poem ends with one of the many striking similes in this collection: “and hurry, for outside, minutes pass, / their wings brush the windows / like muffled screams.”
Connolly’s masterful poems take us through a vast array of ordinary life and small miracles as well as through numerous instances of close attention to nature, which often end with dream-like images of change. In her compact stanzas on different ways of interacting with a spider, echoing Whitman, she tells us it spins its “small hand lettered invitation,” an intricate way of communicating with her. For, as she states in another poem, “Insects spoke to me; birds knew my name.”
We can intuit, from many of her elegiac poems, that holding onto grief changes us, too. In “Grief’s Panther,” to enact her response to her father’s death, she writes that the panther, her grief, leaped from a boulder “to knock me so flat I could barely stand.” She tells herself, “Go slow.” She is also adept at ending her poems in enigmatic yet prophetic ways. She ends the poem “Alma,” which she tells us means “kind,” with “the streetlights look like transformed moons.” In “Old Sonora,” a starkly stunning and necessary poem, which refers to the O’odham language, she ends with the line “there was not even a word for border.” In “Spring in the Desert,” she is ready to begin anew. At the end of the poem she notes, “Milkweed open their tiny buds as if / to say, It’s possible; I too can change.” We can intuit, from many of these elegiac poems, that holding onto grief is not only possible; it can be transformative.
Her stream-of-consciousness prose poem, “Dream of the River,” ends with this beautifully wrought prediction: “Soon the breeze will lift me so that I can see the small pebble in the bottom of a birch bark canoe painted with the day of my death, moving toward me in the mist.” Throughout this superb collection, we learn the importance of paying attention to every living thing and never to shirk from living life fully. Connolly teaches us that, as Simone Weil said, attention is a form of love.
Bonnie Naradzay is the author of Invited to the Feast (Slant Books, 2025). Her poems have appeared in AGNI, The American Journal of Poetry, Birmingham Poetry Review, Cider Press Review, The Georgia Review, Cumberland River Review, Dappled Things, New Letters, Poet Lore, Rhino, Innisfree, Xavier Review, and many other journals. While at Harvard University’s graduate program, she was a member of Robert Lowell’s class on “The King James Bible as English Poetry.” Later, she was a winner of the University of New Orleans Poetry Prize (a month’s stay in the South Tyrol castle of Ezra Pound’s daughter Mary). Three of her poems have been nominated for a Pushcart prize. A 2017 graduate of the St John’s College Graduate Institute, she has led poetry classes at the D.C. Women’s Jail and currently leads weekly poetry sessions at Street Sense, Miriam’s Kitchen, and a retirement community, all in Washington, D.C.
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