How It Was with Scotland

This is a book about the presence of absence. Not about, perhaps, but devoted to; loss or absence as our companions, our influences, by whom we are somehow described and known. Read how Joan eloquently discuss this slim and lovely book of poetry and paintings: When I was six I watched my mother play Emily in Our Town. And somehow I comprehended the acute sense of the life Emily had lost, as she returned to witness the day of her twelfth birthday. Now absent from all life, she could see and fully sense the precious particulars everyone else overlooked as they went about their day. This was my first conscious awareness of the presence of absence. I also encountered it in the late 70s while reading Virginia Woolf's Jacob's Room. Jacob died in WWI, but his room contained a palpable sense of his presence. I could feel and almost see him there. Thinking of loss or absence as something to get to know and be known by may seem odd, but this is what informs the poems in How It Was with Scotland. What made it possible for this relationship to realize itself was my fortunate connection with Noah Saterstrom. Noah's art in an online journal inspired me to write a poem I sent him. This led to a correspondence and to Noah suggesting we collaborate on a manuscript consisting of his paintings from a box of old famiy photos he'd recently come across matched to poems I d write in response. This process took a year. Noah would send an image created from a photo; I'd write a poem utilizing the image as a catalyst. Because of the back and forth nature of our collaboration I was able to engage in a new relationship to what had been and, at the time, was no more. The literal details of my own experience resonated with Noah's images in the way of refracted or illumined light making it possible for me to see and comprehend my own story anew. Trauma, I've come to believe, is a sacred wood, one to be respected and explored. The pathway through is for each individual to discern. For me language became an ally helping me fathom what, until then, I had been unable to see or fully grasp. Language in concert with Noah's images gave voice and form to the knowledge and life of loss.