Some years later, we moved again. This time we headed east to the Maritimes. My thoughts of death packed up their belongings and moved with me. The nightly ritual went on. And on and on.

     Things were changing in my life then, and not all for the better. They were very challenging and difficult times. The consistent and insistent morbid thoughts did little to alleviate the difficulties. Things eventually came to a head. I knew I had to tackle it straight on, and so the process of turning these deathly thoughts into words began.

     I just started spewing words out to see where they might go. At some point, the ideas began to form themselves around the sections that ultimately shaped the book: Songs, Visions, and Meditations.  I threw myself into each one of these wholeheartedly. I need to be honest here; none of this was easy emotionally. The drafts that emerged were hard wrought and exhausting. I am not sure I would ever want to go there again. But nevertheless, the poems began to find their way to the surface. The visions of death and the songs of death took shape, but the meditations put up great resistance.

     At first, I tried to write the meditations simply as my thoughts on death, but I soon discovered that my thoughts were vapid, lacking any real substance. If I couldn't even summon up the interest in them, who else would? I needed another way in. I sat there at the table day after day struggling in every way possible. At that point, we owned our second house – an Empire Style home originally built in the late 1870's for a book seller and stationer, which appealed to me no end. It had also later served as a university residence for graduate women and consequently had a large sitting room coverted into a library. I finally was unable to unpack the thousands of books I had gathered over the years and have enough room to place each and every one within easy access. That was where I wrestled with the poems and myself. Despite the large quantity of books, I had an uncanny knack for visualising their spines and knowing within a dozen books or so of where they were to be found. One section of shelving on the front wall by the bay window was reserved for poetry. I was sitting at the table one night, practically tearing my hair out, when for some unknown reason The Dream Songs by John Berryman came to mind. I hadn't read them in decades, but, looking at the shelves, I knew exactly where to put my hand on the book. I rose from the tbale, slipped it from the shelf and began to read. From there on over a period of about a week, I immersed myself in all things to do with Berryman. Poems, articles, book extracts. I began using some of the lines from his poems as opening lines for my own poems. I took phrases from interviews and images from biographies. I used them as starting points and ran riot with them in my tumultuous imagination. I wrote my way through them over weeks and weeks until only my own words were left, until Berryman was but a ghost within the lines, and the form I had been seeking began to take shape.  I was ready to begin anew. The Meditations had found their way.

     The shape was still rough, however. I felt at first that they need to be prose poems, befitting their meditative quality, but the poems resisted that also. I liked the shape of the prose poem, how the lines ran up against the margins more like sentences; but I missed the power of the line itself, the line-break. This remained a conundrum until the obvious solution presented itself to me one evening: The slash - the punctuation mark used to indicate the end of a line of poetry when quoting two or more lines within a paragraph of text. I could break the line within itself. The paragraphs eventually gave way to long lines, but the slash remained. I tried all lengths of stanzas, quatrains, couplets etc. before settling on the tercet – birth, life, death.

     The Songs sometimes took the shape of sonnets (the poetic form derived from the Italian word sonetto meaning little song). Songs of celebration, songs of grief, songs of loss, songs of healing and rebirth. The Visons, naturally, thrived on the image. Their lines evolving as a sequence of images whose meaning relied more on the rhythm and timbre than any obvious narrative progression – although each had, for me, a clear narrative framework containing the thematic concern. The subjects were diverse ranging from the rusting process to quicksilver, from the camera obscura to the Danse Macabre. The Meditations contemplated equally diverse subject matter from prison hulks to rendering vats to the environmentally toxic ship graveyards at Alang in India. There were poems in memory of Berryman, Hart Crane, and Randall Jarrell. The ghosts of Plath, Sexton, Brautigan, Pound, and many more moved silently and elusively through their lines.

The poems took years to form and reform. Individually they found places of rest in a variety of literary magazines and anthologies. Each poem bar one or two was published. Many, when sent out in multiple submissions, were accepted twice and several three times leaving me to reject the publication and not the other way around for a pleasant change. Still, the collection as a whole felt unfinished, evasive. I turned and returned to it. Culling poems (already published) as I went. Allowing the manuscript to live in the world and allowing for decomposition as well as composition. Ultimately the collection, as was published by Salt Publications, settled into itself. Found its own way of being in the world.

The Death Poems: Songs, Visions, Meditations can be purchased from Salt Publishing.