Abstract

In general, this collection of lyric and narrative poetry is concerned with the implications of loss: how it emerges in, and how it impacts upon the living of our lives. Several poems explore the categories of mourning and celebration, lost and found, attempting to both construct and deconstruct our notions of these binaries. Many narrative pieces reveal portraits of family life and often grapple with the intensity of familial bonds. Within these pieces, events are revealed in a fragmentary manner, providing snippets of storyline, resisting the expected progression of a beginning, middle and end. Additionally, characters, aside from the narrator, are given "speaking parts" and a polyphony of voices, and thus, perspectives are meant to demonstrate the speaker's inability to control an entire narrative. These formal strategies reflect the act of remembering and are indicative of the nature of history and storytelling--suggesting that a story often becomes a mutation of its original self and is reconfigured as it passes from one generation to the next. Other poems in this project are interested in the border between public and private spheres. These poems, many situated in urban landscapes, provide a site for an investigation and inquiry into the nature of human relations within the cityscape. For example, where does the individual, after emerging from the intimacy of family life, situate himself? How is the gap between reality and longing--that is, the alienation one experiences in the city and the desire to belong--bridged in an urban centre? And finally, what responsibility, if any, do we have towards our neighbour?