... Now an entire row of moons is rising,
rising, rising, risen - we are there:

Total Maturity. The trick is how
to amortize remorse, desire and dread.
Eyes ahead, companions: Life is Now.
The harder years are opening ahead.


from 'Turning Forty'
           

Jonathan Galassi's North Street opens with a set of 'dithyrambs', extravagant irregular compositions that evoke both the flow of the seasons and the currents of feeling in a life. As in a classical dithyramb, the shared world of nature and history is brought into tension with the personal world of feeling and private memory.

Finding a form for experience, the poet raids the treasure house of language. The forty poems in North Street are concerned with the middle years, not so much a time as an ill-defined space between 'Turning Forty' and 'Turning Fifty', between coming to maturity and glimpsing its limits and its end; between original desire and conditional freedom, between the recognition of aloneness and gratitude for 'the gnawing, the knowing, /the being and being here'.