Landscapes of the Exiled (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781962847209)

Landscapes of the Exiled is a journey into the interior. In the beginning we are rooted in a specific, yet unnamed place, an island where birds die against picture window glass and we try to resurrect them. Stationery ocean rocks appear to move and, on closer inspection become giant seals that move inland in a threatening manner. The further we go into the interior, the darker and more surreal the journey becomes until we arrive at a place where the exiles themselves are.

These people, places, objects were written over a period of forty years and are heavily inflected by European unnaturalists Ritsos and Transtromer. Neighbors becomes Eumenides who spy on our houses, neighbors beat their dogs to death, and ceaselessly drag garbage to the curb, creating sparks where their metal containers strike the concrete. Girlfriends throw their partner's possessions from second floor windows; a wife makes her end of season turning of the garden into a physical assault of the earth. These neighbors may be rooted to a place but they are exiled from the contemporary world as we know it and become more so as the sequence unfolds. The final section is a literal voyage in the dark, a journey to the end of a night of the soul. Is it a dream or a real journey? The spirit guide is a kind of disembodied voice that has an improbable name, Gladys, and is the product of an actual dream where Gladys offers the poet a corkscrew saying, "You never know when you might need one." The ensuing journey, with corkscrew securely in hand, the poet travels a darkling plain that becomes a steep climb with caves in it, to where? Interior monologues are impressions, expressions of this trek without purpose, other than the trek itself; we keep moving because moving is what we do.

At times the thinking and the speaking are indistinguishable like a Beckett play on a dark stage with a drawn blackout curtain between the poet and the exterior voices, places where only the hint of shadow moving is visible. In the end there is a kind of dawning, a place in a valley below where there maybe be a guest house with a picture window that fatally impacts bird's flight patterns.