Continuum

Arthur Erbe’s Continuum illustrates the ways time affects our lives. The poems explore how each month, day, moment and memory shapes how we think about the passing of the hours. Recalling past moments links what we recall with how we think about events that happened years ago. Poems in this collection explore how certain months evoke incidents, how specific days record an event, how time passes during one day. The content of the poems follows specific forms. Some poems are long and slim; other follow a thought process in a looser pattern, and others find their own form, following the meaning of the experience recorded. In the poem “One Second,” the speaker says, “time makes no difference here/today and yesterday are the same/Yet I travel here with chosen words/arranged to recreate a place.”The “place” is created by the poet with the words that describe a continuum from his early life to the present to memories of special places such as Yeats’ gravestone in Sligo, Ireland and the Odeon Café in Zurich, Switzerland. The journey through time evokes feelings of delight, discovery, loneliness, regret, and dream-like situations. Although most of the poems explore the real world, there are occasions when the poems contain elements of surrealism. However, reading about the journey gives a sense of a life lived, of introspective desires and how we cannot escape from time.