Approximate Wilderness

These are (mostly recent) poems that have grown out of the landscape of rural and small town upstate New York, out of the dying factory cities and the empty fields that connect them. The poems tend to be free-associative as opposed to linear, with images and thoughts leading one to the next in patterns that may or may not become apparent to the reader. The title of the collection is a description of the ambiguity of place, the idea that not all landscapes can be accurately mapped. The landscapes themselves (and people described) are tangled up with ordinary fears of modern day living, with the inevitability of war, the need for human contact, the futility of the individual's fight in the face of a faceless society...in short, the poems are reflections of what I see around me. They are, I would hope, not defeatist but cathartic. The anger and sense of hopelessness needs to be purged so that life can go on.