As the impacts of climate change, deforestation, extinctions, loss of diversity together with human population growth we are facing loss every day — losses that all too often are overlooked in our culturally entrained focus on comfort and economic growth. I have come to understand the power of grief and why it hitherto was not part of my life: our culture does not embrace grief, it much rather pushes it away in order to not face the realities of loss and our own ephemerality; we are grief phobic. As I learn to dance with grief I find rather than it being an immobilizing force it is a motivating force activating my capacity to proceed.
veiling: grief and delight is a collections of poems written during the latter part of 2019 while I was deeply researching the impacts and realities of ecosystem loss and climate change and into the tumultuousness that was early 2020: the trauma of horrific bushfires followed without respite by a global pandemic. The poems in veiling are a call to examine our place in the world, in the cycle that is nature, the cycle that is our very existence; it is a call to examine how we interact with the world, for it is our interactions that influences what happens across the whole planet, from human relations to environmental degradation. These poems are a deep dive into grief and its power to heal.
veiling: grief and delight was to be launched during a festival in 2020, the festival was cancelled — the collection was finally launched in November 2022.
The book specs: 36 pages, soft cover, features 15 poems and 10 black and white images by Joseph Horvat.