The Silence

The title poem of The Silence is a meditation on Sibelius and the thirty years he spent grappling with an eighth symphony that he eventually burned. The poem is emblematic of a broader concern with the mystery of the creative process, explored in the work of other artists but also grappled with first-hand, in the composition of poems. Death, that most emphatic of silences, is a recurring theme; but so too is the bright potentiality of the unknown, the beyond. A tribute to the late Dennis O'...