Timestamp by David Breskin Review by H.L. HIx

Timestamp by David Breskin

Immediacies, Plural: Review by H.L. HIx

Publisher: ‎ Canisy Press 

Publication date: April 14, 2026

ISBN: 9781732595644

Pages (of book):240

The poems in David Breskin’s collection Timestamp are presented in chronological order according to when they were composed.  Each ends with a timestamp attesting to the date and time of composition, one poem per day from a first timestamp of “Sunday, 11 August 2024  11:49 am” to a last timestamp of “Monday, 24 February 2025  9:11 am.”  The timestamp of each poem also appears along with the poem’s title in the table of contents.  The book’s structural principle, then, is its generative principle.  It pursues the ideal Simeone Weil gives as “Every act should be considered from the point of view not of its object but of its impulsion.  The question is not ‘What is the aim?’; it is ‘What is the origin?’”  In this characteristic, Timestamp resembles an abstract expressionist painting: the artist does not apply the paint in a way determined by the subject matter of the painting; the subject matter of the painting is the way the artist applies the paint.

To highlight the contrast between Breskin’s approach and, say, a sonnet sequence, one might distinguish constraints of form from constraints of process.  Each is a vehicle for the shaping of language into poetry, but they operate differently.  Constraints of form (fourteen lines, iambic pentameter) shape the made poem; constraints of process (a poem a day, no revision) shape the making of the poem.  Constraints of form, such as those that make a sonnet a sonnet, aspire to capacity,–as Iris Murdoch suggests in proposing “self, thing, person, story and work of art” as sharing a feature, wholeness–that enables them to “function as analogies of each other,” or as Blake envisions in his wish “To see a world in a grain of sand / And a heaven in a wild flower, / Hold infinity in the palm of your hand / And eternity in an hour.”  Constraints of process, such as those to which Breskin hews, aspire to contact, as Louise Glück avers in saying that “contact, of the most intimate sort, is what poetry can accomplish,” and Czeslaw Milosz confirms in identifying “elementary contact, verifiable by the five senses,” as an experience more important to poetry “than any mental construction.”  

Constraints of form promise integrity, as Wendell Berry asserts: “By its formal integrity a poem reminds us of the formal integrity of other works, creatures, and structures of the world….  Thus the poet affirms and collaborates in the formality of the Creation.”  Constraints of process promise immediacy, as, in his introduction to Breskin’s process-forward collection, W. S. Di Piero declares.  Comparing Breskin’s daily writing practice in making Timestamp to Paul Valéry’s practice of daily notebook-keeping, Di Piero observes that

to make the poems in Timestamp he [Breskin] set himself to work early each morning, writing one poem today, another tomorrow, with no revising or review of the previous day’s work—105 consecutive poems that track the immediacy of the moment and life’s thrilling, sometimes tedious day-to-day-ness.

Breskin’s commitment to constraints on the process of Timestamp’s composition manifests as immediacy in the poems thus composed.  Extending Di Piero’s observation, one might even say Breskin’s poems track immediacies, plural.  They track the immediacy of the here and now: both the here and the now.  Pushing the point even farther: each of those, the here and the now, can be subdivided, here into location and region, and now into moment and period.

That is, the poems of Timestamp seek a here at two scales, one that could be called location, the other region.  The distinction need not be sharp or clean: I just mean something like the difference between the “here” as in “I don’t even have to go to the kitchen because I keep a coffee setup here in my study” and the “here” as in “I like the city but it’s quieter here in the mountains.”  One “here” picks out a location confined within a hundred square feet, the other a region that covers hundreds of thousands of square miles.

Breskin’s poems inhabit both the here of location and the here of region.  Immediacy of location permeates the poems, as (to choose almost at random one example from the very many in the collection) the beginning of “The Mail Gaze” locates the speaker and the reader in the speaker’s neighborhood:

The new mailbox on my corner has teeth

plus an improved smaller slot to prevent

tampering and theft and fraud and seniors

missing meals from social insecurity.

Immediacy of region is no less pervasive than immediacy of location.  Again giving only a single example, “Conventional Wisdom” places one somewhere, anywhere in the U.S.:

If your party hats come from Vietnam

while you’re promising American jobs

keep it on the down-low. Shuttle buses

must avoid demonstrations at all costs.

Cater to your base early but go broad

as things ramp. Fight oppo with denying

smiles. Test memes on Monday to see which

stick.

As they inhabit both the here of location and the here of region, so the poems in Timestamp inhabit both the now of moment (“I’ll be late for work if I don’t leave now”) and the now of period (“Communication used to be slow but now it’s instantaneous”).  “Try Not,” for instance, begins in the moment.

Try not to think about The Pink Panther.

Try not to think about the oiled fella

in the assless leather chaps spreading his

good cheer in front of me in the Gay Pride

Parade for the benefit of cheering

Iowa tourists standing behind saw-

horses.

By contrast, “Landscape Panting” begins in the “now” of period.

The clouds have sharp edges now and the day

grinds forward. Billionaires, feinting this way

and that, push us around their board game squares

like nobody’s business. Chutes and Ladders.

Monopoly. Duopoly. Scrabble.

Oligarchy. Crimes Against Humanity.

I take it that one upshot of such attention to the construction of the “here” and “now” is recognition that the “here” and the “now” in which one locates oneself condition the “us” with which one identifies and the “them” from which that “us” distinguishes itself.  (If “here” is my study, then “us” is my partner and myself by contrast with everyone not in our household; if “here” is the mountains, then “us” is residents of the interior west by contrast with the residents of the east or west coast.)  The general recognition that “here” and “now” condition “us” is attended by more particular recognitions, such as that the “now” of period constructs an inclusive “us.”  In “Hydroclimate Whiplash,” for example, “now” is not today by contrast with yesterday but by contrast with years and decades ago:

                                                                     The way winter

used to match summer was cute, you could print

an almanac and plant seeds like Swiss trains.

Now drought-pluvial seesaws have taken

over the playgrounds we fence and plunder.

“Now” is a period, the Anthropocene, so “us” is all of humanity.  “Oh, pluvial and fluvial, save us / from ourselves.”

The search for immediacy in all its manifestations (here and now, location and region, moment and period) can face the transcendent, as it does for Søren Kierkegaard’s knight of faith seeking an “absolute relation to the absolute,” or it can face the immanent, as it does for Elizabeth Bishop’s sandpiper staring at the spaces between his toes, and for whom there is “no detail too small.”  Giving Bishop’s sandpiper as the representative seeker of immediacy in the immanent makes Breskin’s own shorebird poem, “Broken-Wing Display,” seem like a proof text for his pursuit of immediacy in the immanent, and a pivotal poem in the book, even a representative poems suggestive of the whole collection.  In it, “shorebirds / Etch-A-Sketch the surf line, tracing tangos // waves erase,” and it concludes with a couplet that, if poetry collections had thesis statements, would be my candidate for Breskin’s: “The world is blurred mist and tectonic rub. / There’s almost nowhere safe and sure to stand.”

H. L. Hix’s recent books include a collaboration with Jonathan Weinert, Ghost Smoke, and a poetry collection, As Wind Rounds Sandstone, As Ice Sections Schist.

David Breskin is a writer and record producer. He has published nine books of poetry, journalism, fiction and multi-media art exploration, and produced over twenty albums spanning three decades, including music by John Zorn, Bill Frisell and Nels Cline.

14 October 2026