The Ancient Light of the Dead is a lyrical collection of poetic portraits drawn from a lifetime of encounters across continents. Through vivid, fragmentary glimpses of ordinary and extraordinary lives, these poems explore memory, mortality, and the shared human journey.
The Ancient Light of the Dead is a casual stroll through the kind of eclectic village cemetery that each of us designs and builds over the course of a lifetime, and that each of us will one day inhabit. The 84 portraits in this collection are drawn from fragmentary beams of light that crossed the author’s experience—beautiful people, plain ones, ugly ones, intelligent ones, stupid ones, accomplished ones, abject failures, bullies, victims, criminals, saints, cheats, heroes, children, cowards, liars—the rich, the poor, the defeated, the unbeaten, the brave, the aged. Each person experienced his or her allotted share of fretting and strutting, with sound or fury or befuddlement, only to be heard no more. They lived in Australia, New Zealand, the West Indies, Canada, the USA, or Indian reservations in the American West—but in the end they have come together in one person’s memory. Different roads, same destination.
