The Fountain of Bandages

"Song-text" is not an attractive term, but it has its uses. Poem and poetryhave, in my experience, come to be such pestilent and unpopular wordsthat it can be a relief sometimes to reach out for some neutral alternative.Today the prospect of any kind of poetry at all in the long term can seemvaporous at best. That prospect, I would venture to say, is as dauntingnow as it has ever been during my lifetime. Is there no way forward? I have been trying, particularly in recent years, to cometo terms with what might well be the one viable option left to us - anoption that is, sad to say, as humbling as it is unlikely and onerous. Itinvolves retracing our steps in a decisive, perhaps irrevocable, way. Thereare moments when the future resides somewhere in the past.My own best hope is that this gathering of poems, as diverse or motley as it mightseem, is suggestive of some other, more modest, but predominant, idea.It does, after all, have its own larger story to tell - that of a traveler inthe margins of a volatile, diminished, and stricken time.

Pagina's: 122, Hardcover, Tiny Wings Publishing