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.