In my collection, Postmeridian/Antemeridian, I have sought to explore our perception of time in relation to the nature of memory, loss and trauma, and in so doing, I have attempted to find an existential anchoring in the multipolarity of the twenty-first century. The poems in the collection investigate how our memory fractures and disintegrates our past experience, and how our sense of past, present and future blur into each other. Using fragments of condensed poetic language, I have created poem sequences which speak through a mixture of personas. Interweaved throughout are images of the natural world; of trees, sea and riverscape. I have used the poems to try and express the difficulty of translating the human experience in to words. The collection begins with the first words uttered, as if midsentence, from a veiled speaker, who is learning how to speak again out of a long-held silence, and transitions to more lyrical, expansive sequences; and in the final poem, the speaker challenges the reader to actively participate in the meaning of the words being expressed. I have tried to create a sense of a narrative journey through the collection, emphasised by elements of river and sea, and which ends without closure, and implies a continuance of the poems’ exploration of their own poetics beyond the final sequence. I am currently writing several shorter poems which continue the themes explored in Postmeridian/Antemeridian, and my intention is that these will be incorporated into a book-length collection.
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