Meredith Davies Hadaway’s Comments

On a recent trip to Wales, I followed a narrow goat path of a road for over an hour looking for a neolithic burial site called “Maen Y Bardd” (trans. “The Poet’s Stone”). The hillside was steep and inhospitable, with low shrubs scraping the side of my rental car and no signs of human inhabitants, just some bored sheep. What I thought would be an affirmation of my journey as a poet ended with an ignominious revelation: I was running out of gas. So I turned around, retracing the same perilous switchbacks, this time with the added taint of failure. It was only later, when I thought about the experience as a metaphor for the poet’s struggle, that I realized the obvious: It’s not about what you look for, it’s about what you find. These poems represent what I found while I was looking for something else—chasing a form, an image, a memory, a mythical place.

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