Moorings

Moorings, the fourteenth collection from award-winning poet Christopher Levenson, is a profound meditation on loss and aging. “It is an intricate business, growing old,” posits the speaker in the titular poem. “Though I once had a photographic memory,” the poet reminisces, “those negatives are lost, and will not develop.” Time and old age make room for loss, but so does greed—“with time language disintegrates… lost to dementia … speech taken over by corporate empires, unique ways of feeling lost.…” Moving from memories of childhood and artistic tributes to frustrated critiques of capitalism balanced with doses of lighthearted wordplay, these poems celebrate the colour of life, yet are wary of the darkness that can be found inside and around us. Pulling from a wide range of experience and memories but always anchored in the particular and the familiar, the poems in Moorings confront aging and death head-on, while also celebrating the spiritual sustenance of friendship and memories in our steadily changing world.