For six months during 2015, two poets known for their capacity to
create lyric responses to the complex realities around them, yet
poets fully inscribed in both a western literary tradition and
other longer traditions that have been marginalized, exchanged
poems that were in constant dialogue even as they remained wholly
defined and shaped by the details of their own private and public
lives. Kwame Dawes base was flat prairieland of Lincoln, Nebraska,
a mid-American landscape in which he, a black man, felt at once
alien and curiously committed to the challenges of finding home;
and John Kinsella s base was in the wide open violently beautiful
landscape of western Australia, his home ground, thick with memory
and heavy with the language of ecological change, political
ineptitude and artistic defiance. E-mail was the bridge. These two
poets found themselves in the middle of the swirl of political and
social upheavals in their spheresDawes contemplating race in the
crucible of police killings of black bodies in the US, and Kinsella
carrying the weight of contemplating and challenging the injustice
of the theft of indigenous land and country in Australia and the
terrible treatment of refugees and immigrants in that country.
These poems reflect the very different worlds that have shaped
these writers, and in the wonderful way that poetry can chart the
unpredictable journey towards friendship. They also reflect
commonalities: love of family, regret, cricket, art, politics,
music, and travel. Indeed, there is much in these poems that
provides us with a remarkable accounting of what can occupy and
frighten and delight two thinking and creative men who have devoted
a great deal of energy and time into making poems in the day to day
unfolding of our world. The pleasure that is seeded into the poems
is apparentin poem after poem one senses just how each is hungry
and anxious to hear from the other and to then treat the surprises
and revelations that arrive as triggers for his own
lyricintrospective, risky, complex and formally considered and
beautiful. The respect and admiration that these two poets have for
each other is apparent in the poemsin the echoes, in the ways in
which they stretch one another, and in the ease of languagea kind
of poetic honesty that comes from authority, assurance, and
curiosity. This was an accidental pairingan email exchange between
an editor and a poet that blossomed into a dare of sorts, and then
into a project that came under the brilliant scrutiny of two
prolific artists writing at the height of their poetic strength.
Speak from Here to There reminds us of the ways that poetry can
offer comfort and solace to the poet and how, at the same time, it
can supply the ignition for a peculiar creative frenzy that
enriches us all."
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