Nobody is supposed to keep yesterday's news. The phrase means something stale, ready for the recycling. J.J. Loe's poem does what the idiom forbids: it stops to read "a single obsolete page" and finds "the truth of time" written there. The central idea is a paradox. What we dismiss as out of date turns out to be where time is recorded most honestly, and the gap between then and now is narrower than the present would like to believe.
The imagery blurs paper and water. Truth "drifts" across the page, and later our lives have a "current," a word that puns quietly on current events, the very thing the old page no longer is. The page is a "tarnished medium," and tarnish belongs to silver, something that once shone. Perhaps "medium" also hints at a spiritualist's go-between, which would suit a page that summons the dead, though that is a reading rather than something the poem insists on. Then comes "The births / the funerals. —", two newspaper columns of arrivals and departures. The slash cuts between them like a ruler. The full stop followed by a dash is odd, since the sentence both ends and refuses to end, which suits a poem about things that won't stay finished.
The second stanza is the densest. "Children now grown & contracting themselves / into the silent sentiments of uncertain shadows" is full of small contradictions. The children have grown, yet the verb is "contracting," so they shrink, or perhaps catch something, or sign themselves over to something. The hurried ampersand sits oddly beside the formal vocabulary, and the sibilance of "silent sentiments of uncertain shadows" makes the line itself hushed. These figures "reform upon the imagination," re-forming not as people but as shadows. Then the poem turns on our lives, whose current becomes "mere transgressions of the progress / we had hoped we had made." Transgression usually means crossing a boundary. Here progress is the boundary, and ordinary life keeps stepping over it. The stuttering "hoped we had" adds doubt, since progress is not even claimed, only hoped to have been achieved.
The single-line stanza that follows, "Everything lost returning back again," is the plainest sentence in the poem, almost all short words after a run of long abstractions. It is also redundant, because "returning back again" says the same thing three times. The tautology loops, so the language acts out the circular time the line describes.
In the last stanza the eye travels from "faded headlines" down to "advertised figures," from grand events to prices and small print. "Figures" may also echo the human shapes and shadows of earlier lines, though the poem doesn't force that link. These figures separate the past from "the jealous concerns of today," and "jealous" is the most surprising word in the poem. Today seems to envy the past, perhaps because the past is finished and can't be argued with. The poem doesn't explain, and the trailing slash leaves the thought hanging. The ending, "a moment of prolonged obsolescence / reads interminably across the page," is another contradiction, since a moment cannot be prolonged. It echoes the "forgotten moment" of the opening, and "page" returns from the first line, so the poem finishes where it began. Obsolescence, the poem suggests, never completes. It just goes on being read.
Structurally, there is no rhyme and no steady metre. The long, unspooling sentences are built from Latinate words like "obsolete," "transgressions" and "interminably," which give a bureaucratic, print-room sound and a slow, heavy rhythm far from the snap of a headline. The slashes, dashes and ampersand interrupt this, like cuts or damage on the page itself.
The poem matters because it takes a throwaway cliché and shows it to be wrong. It never says whose page this is or what events it reports, and that anonymity seems deliberate, because births and funerals belong to everyone. For students, it is a good example of how punctuation, repetition and word choice can carry an argument. The poem claims that the past recurs, and its own looping sentences and circling ending say the same thing.