SHADOWS SURROUNDING A FIRE - Voices From A Chronicle

Patterns in these poems flicker through three generations from a home destroyed by war to a family new-forged. Maril mourns her sister, "the sun's streamer ... I try to wind her round my hand to keep her / long enough for goodbye before she disperses in gilt glory / and sets." Her daughter grows up a wanderer searching for origins refracted through amniotic maturity and her son "remembers broken faces read as though they were forbidden books / disembodied voices child-recorded for the man's decoding." But he is puzzled by his children, one enraptured by the world, the other disregarding it, while his wife escapes to her world of art, "a bird returning to its landscape / she is lost in bliss among the shapes of light." When at last Maril accepts her sorrows, for homeland, sister, the autistic granddaughter, she recalls rosebuds frozen in the ruined garden. "Some love never opens, clenched in its unlived self. / The thaw left only a handful of grief / for the thief of bloom." Does past compose the present or present illuminate the past? Do shadows frame a fire, or fire sculpt the shadows?