William N. Gates

Minutes Toward Night William N. Gates

The title of this collection of ''quick takes'' refers to the writer's intent to catch within a limit of five minutes a moment, a dream, a memory; to articulate the fugitive, to net the particles of a stream. As in his previous books, River Riding Writing and In Words Dive, these takes were penned as rapidly as possible, bypassing punctuation and syntax, trusting in a coherence of feeling or image. By transcribing manuscript to print, the impetus of handwriting is lost, but perhaps not the life that inspired it.