Turning in Time: Poems in Search of Home

Carl Sandburg US poet and Pulitzer Prize winner writes: Poetry is a phantom script telling how rainbows are made and why they go away. That is both true and false. Poetry is in one form an engagement with the Invisible seeking to give it tangible expression. It is also a recognition of the hard facts of life; at once an act of disclosure a reaching out in empathy a sketching of a map pointing to our place in the scheme of things.There is no guarantee that poetry will make sense. Why should it? It can however communicate our human condition even if it evades our understanding. There is poetry John Cage wrote as soon as we recognise we possess nothing. Poetry is necessary food that sustains us through time through a journey of dispossession and discovery.The poems in Turning in Time invite a dialogue that seeks to push aside surface debris to capture hidden depths in our daily experience. A turn away from the obvious in order to advance reasons to look ahead hopefully. A quest to identify a source of light that can lead us on.To be a poet is to be a pilgrim sharing food with fellow travellers. It is always good to share a meal together.Religious/non-religious. Sacred/profane. Formal/free. Mythic/grounded. Spiritual/practical. All and none apply. Denham Griersons collection will not allow us the easy tricks of made-up taxonomies. The collection just is what it is. And it will not submit to easy characterisations like from the heart or rooted in mystery or grounded in experience. Again all and none apply. There is work to be done here; no longer by the poet but by the reader. The poem gains meaning and lives only through the readers gaze and the readers engagement. Then and only then is the poem truly happening.From the Foreword by Karel Reus