veiling: grief and delight

Greer Taylor, veiling: grief and delight

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 our behaviour, for it is our behaviour that influences what happens across the whole planet, from human relations to environmental degradation. The 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.

Below is one of the poems from the book:

proceed

in grief I feel

rain
running
down the cheek
of my soul

in grief I hear

frogs singing
at my grave

in grief I see

the moon
full
against
a velvet sky

in grief I touch

the body
of my lover
… like descending mist

in grief I smell

soil
after rain
: petrichor

in grief I taste

all
that is sweet
dissolved in time

in grief I know

that I love
what I love

in grief I speak

of that
which I love

in grief I can proceed

 

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