At 84, poet William Minor reveals truths about life and aging in a new collection.

The narrator in Another Morning, the sixth collection of poetry from longtime Monterey County artist, musician, and writer William Minor, 84, speaks with authority from what Shakespeare calls that “time of year thou mayst in me behold.” The poems are celebrations of a long, vibrant life at its denouement, quietly powerful statements of love for his wife of 63 years, his music, and the joy with which he greets each new day.

Minor has dispensed with formalities. The poems in Another Morning are loyal only to the music inherent to the work. Like John Keats, William Yeats or Gerard Manley Hopkins, Minor relies upon his keen ear to keep the poetry’s rhythm in the pocket while suggesting sweet, but notably complex melodies.

“Genesis” is Minor’s elegy to the music that pervades our lives from first breath to last.  “…the sea itself / was silent, sleeping, and then / awoke in song.” The poem’s alliteration and mid-tempo groove soars to a cathedral hall or gospel church climax: “…for our story / can only be told with faith / that finds its voice in song.”

In “The Delights of Age,” Minor sings a litany of physical ailments—from cancer to umbilical hernias to a 27-year-old case of vertigo—that flows with a hitched meter like a dignified man walking with a cane. Yet, mid-stanza, the poem performs a Willy Wonka somersault of overwhelming gratitude that its narrator can still “SING! SING! SING!”

In “Time,” Minor gently mocks the human urge for chronology. In its final stanza, the poet stands quietly defiant at sunset: “The evening sun goes down behind / the telephone wires and darkening trees / I love, and only the chill of evening / will take me back inside the house, / but not the passage of time.”

A serene spirituality and wistful memory pervades Another Morning. The island of Kauai stands in for paradise. A frog teaches Zazen. It has been a lifelong pursuit. When Minor was 17, he fell under the heady influence of Thomas Merton and nearly became a Trappist monk.

“I converted to Catholicism and even took Latin at the University of Michigan. Then I went to New York and met a woman who cured me of wanting to be a monk,” he says with a laugh.

Like the French poet Charles Peguy, whom he invokes, Minor only prays  “while walking the streets or riding a bus…” Or writing poetry.

Another Morning is a poet’s prayer of gratitude. This old pugilist may no longer be able to lace them up, jam until dawn, or carry-lift his beloved wife Betty into the air like a figure skater, but Minor has earned something far more important here in the latter stanzas: grace.

William Minor performs poems and music from Another Morning with Lauren Crux as part of the Monterey Bay Poetry Consortium reading series at 2pm on Sunday, March 8 at Old Capitol Books, 559 Tyler St., Monterey. $5. oldcapitolbooks.com.

Another Morning is available at finishinglinepress.com.