ARC reviews The Hayflick Limit

Matthew Tierney’s The Hayflick Limit opens with an excerpt from Joseph Brodsky’s winter eclogue, which in its 13 words raises at least as many questions: if each body 'falls prey' to the telescope, is distance the hunter? Is proximity? Discovery? Is being preyed upon a relief from the indifference of time, death an acknowledgment of existence? The brevity and the stab of those lines pries us open, leaving the reader far more vulnerable than the poet, though Brodsky evidently knew whereof he wrote. Even my grumpy expectations are not so high as to compare Tierney to his epigraphist, but what a lesson in how to offer poems to their readers. In this second collection, Tierney offers up our world, from the commonplace to the contemporary to the cosmic, with craft and cleverness, but he shies away from that Brodsky-esque eviscerating evocation. Tierney possesses a solid instinct for what constitutes a poetic moment or thing, from the bathetic 'line graph' of an urban, industrial skyline to an eloquently contradictory 'carpet like the Sahara' ... Although Tierney toes an ironic sentimentality and toys with his trademarkish absurdisms, the language itself suggests a vulnerable underbelly.