Voyaging Out is the tenth volume of Peter Abbs’ poetry.
His new book divides into two parts. The first half, Peregrinations, offers an anthology of poems which range from the experience of love to memories of childhood, from philosophical reflections on art and poetry to the dramatic re-telling of other lives. There are poems here about Nietzsche as a schoolboy, the public death of Pope John Paul the Second and of the painter Pierre Bonnard’s erotic obsession with Martha.
One of the new themes is travel: an affirmation of the place of voyaging, both further out into the world and further inwards into the distracted soul. In these poems, celebrating a movement south, `peregrine flights’ become metaphors for a deep inner pilgrimage.
The second part, Transformations, offers three sequences from three great poets in the tradition: Rumi, Dante and Rilke. These poems are not literal translations but work in the manner of metamorphoses.
Transformations is a new departure in the poet’s work. The aim is to convert the original poems into contemporary English and, in the case of the Dante sequence, into contemporary political and ecological contexts. Their purpose is to keep faith with the encompassing spirit of these seminal writers, to bring them forcibly into the modern imagination and, in so doing, to keep alive a conversation with the past.
It’s hard for us to grasp transcendence –
even Orpheus shrinks from the hour
when he moves swiftly beyond us.
Yet when his hand slips from the familiar lyre
there’s no subterfuge and nothing’s superfluous.
Imagination vaults to its freedom.
Table of Contents:
Peregrinations
Self Portrait
A Dream of Arcadia
Shifting Landscapes
Above the River’s Tidal Water
Climate Change
Man in a Trance
Morning at the Oak Woods
Woman with Leukemia
Off all the Maps
Pope John Paul the Second
Nowhere
The Kingdom
The Silver Cross
Zimzum
The Memory of White
Facing November
To Say Goodbye
Curriculum Vitae
Going Well
Beginnings
Love’s Landscapes
Touch
When I Think of Language
Nietzsche at Play
From my University Room
A Brief Lesson on Poetry
Vocation
Bonnard’s Gift
Hopper’s House by the Railroad
On a Train Journey to Falmer
Peregrinations
Paros
Unending Journey
Transformations
The Glass Blower’s Breath
Through the Inferno
Poems to Orpheus
