Survivable Space

Abstract

Most of these poems are concerned with what the mind does when it confronts an empty space, especially a space created by loss. Although an encounter with such a space is often felt - as grief, sadness, blank fear - before it can be thought about, eventually the mind is compelled to make something of the terrible experience so that it can be integrated into the psyche and lived with. The thing made, when made as here by language, is a narrative not about the empty space as such, which is at once impenetrable and overwhelmingly possessed of possibility, but about what the space once held or may come to hold, what made it in the first place, or what surrounds it.