Kevin Casey’s Comments
Several of these poems have at their root some element in the narrators environment thats out of placea simple theme thats a reliable source of writing inspiration for myself. In the case of Abandoned Bicycle, I was bothered by the lingering presence of a bike near my rural home, and this poem was an attempt to understand why this disturbed me.
With Snowmobiling at Midnight, it was again that feeling of dislocationin this case being out so late at night, traveling so quickly, being in the middle of the woodsculminating with the spectacle of the brightly lit grooming machine that moved the whole incident to an almost otherworldly level.
In a similar way, finding snow in May is a rare enough event in this part of the world to share this with my dear sister on her birthday (in the form of a wee snowman, and then this poem), and I attempted to reinforce the uniqueness of this by setting up additional dichotomies: mountain/valley, brother/sister, whole/divided, winter/spring, etc.
The poems Poverty and Clearing His Throat are similar in that I took a basic premise familiar to me and carried this past my own experience and into a fictional place. With Povertywhile I do know what its like to be poor and youngI simply took that idea to a fictional extreme. And with Clearing His Throat, while my sister had really said that my cough and my fathers were similar, he is still alive, doesnt smoke, and we actually get along quite well. So, although that poem seems like Im confessing some familial dirt, the poem is almost wholly fictive (shhh …).
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