The Fountain of Bandages - Hardcover

by Nicholas Mason-Browne (Author), Nic Arp (Editor), Nic Arp (Designed by)

"Song-text" is not an attractive term, but it has its uses. Poem and poetry

have, in my experience, come to be such pestilent and unpopular words

that it can be a relief sometimes to reach out for some neutral alternative.

Today the prospect of any kind of poetry at all in the long term can seem

vaporous at best. That prospect, I would venture to say, is as daunting

now as it has ever been during my lifetime. Is there no way forward?

I have been trying, particularly in recent years, to come

to terms with what might well be the one viable option left to us - an

option that is, sad to say, as humbling as it is unlikely and onerous. It

involves retracing our steps in a decisive, perhaps irrevocable, way. There

are moments when the future resides somewhere in the past.

My own best hope is that this gathering of poems, as diverse or motley as it might

seem, is suggestive of some other, more modest, but predominant, idea.

It does, after all, have its own larger story to tell - that of a traveler in

the margins of a volatile, diminished, and stricken time.