Poetry: Our Intimate Horizon

Poetry is the language that allows us to return to the world

Human beings are constantly looking for a language that is equal to the moving, sometimes swirling, constellation of elements that we find ourselves in the midst of, even in an everyday life. We are born into a very fierce existence that is continually trying to change and mature us into a larger understanding of ourselves and our world, these changes quite often take the forms of traumatic appearances and disappearances, with a sense of our final disappearance becoming more insistent as the years go by. Every human life is an almost surreal and wild experience; even the most ordinary existence is an enormous drama in which each of us participates. Poetry has always been a living way of bringing together the irreconcilables in our lives, a language equal both to the drama and the sense of privilege in being alive, no matter our difficulties. My poem Cleave holds this reconciling of the irreconcilable, the way we are born into opportunity along with a great reluctance for all these ‘opportunities' at one and the same time; ‘we were born in a beautiful reluctance to be here’.