Still Time Reflections on Aging by Kathleen Serley

Kelsay Books, November 2025

Paperback, 46 pp

Poetry

ISBN: 978-1-63980-830-4

Reviewed by Lisa Lickel

Still Time reflects on the experience of aging.

From a light-hearted look at feeling left out of the current culture in “Halloween” to a more serious discussion of loss and decline in “October” Serley’s poems are a view of our older years.

In these 29 poems Serley covers a gamut of aging through memories, cycle of life, fear, joy, acceptance, determination. Prose, haiku, poems with stanzas and paragraphs portray different, yet familiar, aspects of aging. Using null spacing to create breaths in line of many poems, the reader must pause for a moment of extra reflection. In “All These Years,” a stanza continues “She flanked by friends   faces masked/in kinship’s glow  their own voices/” in a staccato rhythm that brings the reader into that space.

Mixed emotions of hunkering down alone in a house during a big winter snowstorm in “Big Storm Coming”: “I think of moving while I can still move” to “A Walk in the Woods” remembering a time when a young family looked for seedlings, to a haiku that shares the joy of being busy listening to the rain meld this life process into an enjoyable flight of fancy to which we can all relate.

Pondering things left to do: “Advocate for student lunches” in “My Time” to a wishful thought of places left unvisited in “Passages” readers of any age will appreciate Serley’s look back, “All Badge Wearers”; look at the present in poems like “The Gift”, and look into the future with the fullness of Still Time.