"Ghosts appear in place of whatever a given people will not face" (p. 65) The poems in Gravesend explore ghosts as instances of collective grief and guilt, as cultural constructs evolved to elide or to absorb a given society's actions, as well as, at times, to fill the gaps between such actions and the desires and intentions of its individual citizens. Tracing the changing nature of the ghostly in the western world from antiquity to today, the collection focuses particularly on the ghosts created by the European expansion of the 16th through 20th centuries, using the town of Gravesend, the seaport at the mouth of the Thames through which countless emigrants passed, as an emblem of theambiguous threshold between one life and another, in all the many meanings of that phrase.
Delving into ancient fables, the Bible, medieval records, Victorian ghost stories, contemporary interviews, and more, this title explores the effects of the ghostly on our daily lives, at times returning to the notion of gravesend, implicitly asking if all ends in the grave or if death itself has an end.
