A boy scratches his name on a staircase as the decades sweep him over him. Young people run from childhood to claim a city that may destroy them, while in the aftermath of a terrible event even our own minds desert us. These are poems of disconnection, from ourselves and from a world that has come unmoored. They ask hard questions about our complicity in creating that world. But they are poems too about what may be found and honoured in that unforgiving space. The city with its 'centuries of settlement and bone' is also a place of refuge and consolation, while the physical world 'which built us and birthed us' is 'with us to the end'. Fragile young lives, caught 'between wonder and dismay', are witnessed without judgement. Face it asks us to take an unflinching but compassionate look at everything we've made and everything that has made us, as we struggle through the constraints of our own nature, continually seeking our own selves and 'something that looks like home'.
Face it asks us to take an unflinching but compassionate look at everything we've made and everything that has made us, as we struggle, continually seeking our own selves and 'something that looks like home'.
