A Cartography of Birds

Poetry exists to draw us back into experience, to re-create a scene or emotion for a person who has not necessarily lived out the moment. A poet affixes in language something of the indeterminate and is accordingly involved in mapping out the unseen currents, the unspeakable essences of the world. A Cartography of Birds separates itself into three "voices" and one longer poem. The poems contained within its pages reflect the rhythms of liturgy, the history of one's personal landscape, and the resonance of locations in which one physically moves. If such poetry feeds on the remembrance of perception, it also offers out the possibility of a memory that one has never owned, a moment given over that has not been lived---a poem created from the necessity of the moment's impulse---that will continue to exist after the poet's own passage in time and space has ceased.