Abstract

Intersection examines the notion of home through a speaker whose gaze shifts between outward and inward aspects, and whose engagement with home is ultimately a quest for self-definition through relation: in the public, external world of community and place, and in the more private contexts of love and belonging. Poems ostensibly located in rooms or adjunct spaces of a house are venues for consideration of relationships through memory, association and observation. Permutations of the sonnets of Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey provide context for discussion of social and personal relationships and values; these themes recur as echoes, reconsiderations and replies, in poems examining relationships as they develop across time and space, playing with dislocation, disembodiment and misconstruction in contexts of friendship and intimacy, culminating in poems which inscribe the failure of intimacy to establish a stable home across a wide cultural gap.