Piotr Gwiazda appeared in Issue 40 with Daylight Saving, a five-part poem set in Stonington, Connecticut. Harbor light, seasonal color, memory, sleep, and the pressure of passing time give the poem its quiet architecture.
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Piotr Gwiazda in the historical archive
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Issue 40 published Daylight Saving in February 2013. The poem moves through brief numbered scenes whose recurring materials—water, light, color, streets, memory, and absence—allow the visible world to register changes in time.
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Daylight Saving
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The sequence opens at a harbor after clouds have parted. A returning boat, a tern, a couple on a wharf, moonlight on Water Street, and the remembered colors of earlier days become points of concentration. Each section keeps the scene spare while allowing perception to open onto a larger question about what time removes from experience.
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Time, memory, and light
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Light carries much of the poem’s memory work. The speaker remembers intensities of illumination and assigns colors to yesterday, last week, and last year. These visual measures make time palpable: memory changes the world into shades and degrees of brightness that can be recalled with precision while remaining impossible to recover.
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Stonington and the visible
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The Issue 40 contributor note recorded that Gwiazda had been Writer-in-Residence at the James Merrill House in Stonington in the fall of 2008. That biographical detail gives the poem’s Stonington setting a concrete literary context. Harbor, wharf, Water Street, and apartment interiors form a landscape where attention to place becomes inseparable from attention to memory.
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Forgetting and the poet
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The closing section turns toward an absent poet and the key to an apartment. The image gathers the sequence’s concerns with memory, loss, and the persistence of places after people have gone. Pebbles and stars answer the speaker’s question about forgetting with an image whose scale stretches from the immediate room to the larger world beyond it.