Joanstown

Between the long title poem and the other poems in the collection, Michael Gilkes sets up a dialogue about the nature of memory and the meaning of experience across time. "Joanstown" is the re-creation, in the voice of a younger self speaking with all the intensity of first love, of the interweaving of person and place (the more elegant gracious Georgetown of the 1940s, with its "cross-stitching" of avenues, bridges, canals), and of a marriage whose seeming perfection leads to hubris. The very concreteness of the re-creation of a time when happiness came so easily is made the more moving for the reader by the framing awareness of its evanescence. The other poems in the collection, in the voice of maturity with all the consciousness of loss as a constant of life, explore the nature of memory as consolation.