About the Book
“Ghosts appear in place of whatever a given people will not face” (p. 65)
The poems in Gravesend explore ghosts as instances of collective grief and guilt as cultural constructs evolved to elide or to absorb a given society’s actions as well as at times to fill the gaps between such actions and the desires and intentions of its individual citizens. Tracing the changing nature of the ghostly in the western world from antiquity to today the collection focuses particularly on the ghosts created by the European expansion of the 16th through 20th centuries using the town of Gravesend the seaport at the mouth of the Thames through which countless emigrants passed as an emblem of theambiguous threshold between one life and another in all the many meanings of that phrase.
The poems in Gravesend explore ghosts as instances of collective grief and guilt as cultural constructs evolved to elide or to absorb a given society’s actions as well as at times to fill the gaps between such actions and the desires and intentions of its individual citizens. Tracing the changing nature of the ghostly in the western world from antiquity to today the collection focuses particularly on the ghosts created by the European expansion of the 16th through 20th centuries using the town of Gravesend the seaport at the mouth of the Thames through which countless emigrants passed as an emblem of theambiguous threshold between one life and another in all the many meanings of that phrase.