Transplant

Notes on Transplant

 

         On revisiting these poems, I call them a journey of the heart.

“Where is home?” the first words on the back of this book. “Mostly in the mind and spirit.” comes the answer.   In retrospect, I must have been more with mind and spirit when first writing these poems.  Some time later, these poems seem more with the heart, and I add this up to a sum that explains that home belongs to us in every interior part, yet even an old wound to the body speaks to us when we touch it.  Whichever part comes to the fore can often be found in poems.  Here is the rest of the quote from the back of the book:

         If we visit a place where once we lived, it is the memories

         crowding in that take us back, not the plaster and brick. 

         Moving is in our DNA, even if we have lived in the same

place for years.  The wood and glass changes because we

change.  In the Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard says

that all inhabited space bears a notion of home, and that an

entire past comes to dwell in a new abode.  Transplant

explores these themes of change and loss, and aging and

more.  It seeks to carry out what Bachelard calls the

function of poetry:  “to give us back the situations of our

dreams.”