ABSTRACT

When people, landscape and memory meet, the consequences are often unpredictable. Memory is, it would seem, the lynch-pin: that faculty which occupies the border between current and former life, but which so often requires that imagination should supply the deficits of recall. Journalist and social commentator Ian Jack observes that ‘the present always depends upon the past, which makes the past a necessary subject of any reporter’s enquiry’ (Jack, 2009, p. xiii). But what happens when attempts are made to convey the past in a themed sequence of poems? How is that dependency managed? What processes are required to strike a balance between the factual recovery and the poetic re-imagining of lost people and places? And what part does landscape play in such attempts?