Shadow Dance

Shadow Dance is a collection of some of the poems Anne Marie Erskine has composed over the years. This collection centers on a variety of themes that are universal to the human spirit: death, love, loss, culture, beauty, and faith. The power of these experiences to evoke profound energy of thought demands hours of perspiration to take “the idea” and transform it to concrete expression.

The journey can be a long encounter of sustained focus to free the shadow’s positive space and produce an outing of the essence of the image. The importance of simply writing down ideas, words, metaphors, sentences, and fragments as unrelated as they appear at the time cannot be over emphasized as those captured ideas sift and marinate, shift and morph, and form the basis for the perfect expression of the shadow to light. That is exactly what writing should accomplish – a new expression of the human experience.

Writing is a struggle of expression that demands we recognize the force within and beyond the self. Poetic language in particular allows the opportunity to express the human condition, empathize with others, exchange thoughts and expand experiences with new perspectives. Writing is discovering the ever new and, yet, the ever same heroic journey that is the essence of humanity.