Author(s): Lauris Edmond

Poetry

"My life as a writer is strange, it's so short - I wonder if it has a future, if I have the power to take hold of my experience, and give it one?...The thing that concerns me most constantly and most painfully is growing old. And being alone, of course. But I don't write about that, yet...whenever I try, I skulk around the question, eye it balefully, too frightened to close with it...All my life it's been the same - it's been hard work to find the substance, the things in experience." Written in 1991, this passage was like a manifesto foreshadowing the trajectory Lauris Edmond's poetry was to follow in the remaining years of her life - elegiac yet celebratory, conversational and sociable, yet never far from meditative solitude. Her evolving poetic self, like her poetry, was shaped by her intelligence as well as her imagination, Spontaneous as her poetry usually appears, like a clear window opening on her world and her life, it is at the same time also about her world and her life. Her poetry is always 'closing with' these things. and is never content simply to look at them. Lauris Edmond died in 2000. This definitive edition of her work is selected and introduced by the poet and critic K. O. Arvidson.