The tiers of dream

Abstract

Since my arrival in Aotearoa / New Zealand from Ireland in 2006, I have revelled in the immense presence of the natural world here and have ventured to explore and chronicle its articulate motions, images, sounds and rhythms. Discovering a place through language is to be confronted by relentless decision-making in pursuit of artistic expression, while allowing for inspiration to materialise in the effortless praise of lines and phrases that are truly surprising in their perception and immediacy. By applying nature and occurrence to an interpretation of the place and time in which I found myself, I have endeavoured to build in these poems occasions of sensory and illuminated experience, which carry the agency of the point of making. Coming into contact with many things that demand explication in a country I am still getting to know, I have attempted to articulate the way in which environment becomes internalised and cared for by the private life of the emotions, allowing the precision of metaphor to complete the transfer from real phenomena and events to the brave and novel, leaving vestiges of the creative impulse. I wish for these poems that they in some way convey the exhilaration felt on perceiving intimately the peculiarities of human relations and the unpredictable routines of nature.