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The past reaches forward was an alternative title for this book. It catches the sense of past, present, and future being bound together in ways not always evident to creatures attached somewhere in the line of events through which we daily live. T.S. Eliot puts it better in the opening lines of ‘Burnt Norton’: Time present and time past/ Are both perhaps present in time future/ And time future contained in time past. Well, this is a heavyweight and somewhat pretentious way to describe an intended feature of many of these poems in which the sequences of time are prominent.
This book is divided into five sections: ‘Times recently past’; ‘Times further past’; ‘Journeys, Travels, Travails’; ‘Trees, Birds, Fish, and Things’; ‘Conflicts’. While these sections bring together poems that share themes, the prevailing concern with our sense of time and its bewilderments is present throughout. The first set of poems gives a context for my own sense of the ‘now’ I have been living in, but this is unreliable, and there is a shifting sense of the author. Poetry, in short, is as often a sub-branch of fiction as it is of auto/biography-reader beware. The topics for the next section may seem further in the past, but I hope are also just as present as in the first section. And while the remaining three sections open out more to the world and its particularities, an undercurrent remains of the temporal mysteries that are touched on throughout and in which, willy-nilly, we are caught.
