Description
This poem has a long and complex evolutionary history. It has been developing in fits and starts for about a decade, its author’s eye always firmly fixed on a clear well defined vision. He recently remarked, “It began during one of those amazing passionate times in my life when the past and the present collide like great movements of water, merging, sweeping me off.” The poem deals with one of the most persistent and important themes of literature, concerning how memories of particular events and people from the past haunt the present and tend to shape a person’s daily realities.
An earlier version of A Curb in Eden was published by Salmon Publishing, Ltd in Ireland in 1999 (ISBN 1-897648-49-9), but the current work has been profoundly revised and rewritten and should be considered as a new book that is derivative from a previously existing work. It is intended as a single poem with a continuous emotional thread divided into named sections and readable in a single sitting. The Salmon edition was of entirely different tone from the current poem, being primarily a past tense document. This current, and we hope final, version is primarily in present tense and presented in a much more direct manner. The Salmon version of the poem has 18 sections and consists of 1097 lines. This new Iris version has only 15 sections, some with different names, but is slightly longer at 1125 lines.
