No Roots Except In Air

The poems of ‘No Roots Except In Air’ explore aspects of the modern sensibility, whereby a clearer, scientific approach to reality has also served to emphasise the disassociation of the ‘civilised’ mind from nature and from human history, and the grave responsibility of creating self-generated meaning and purpose in an intentionless universe. The angst of modernity stems from its inability to either preserve the old forms of faith in exterior meaning and purpose, or to forge new forms that are self-sustaining. We therefore have lost our rootedness in the substantial, and must look to the fluidity of process and the flow of the insubstantial, despite the feelings of insecurity which they bring. Nonetheless we still possess values, languages, empathies and spiritual energies which may allow the thinking individual to escape existentialist despair, and the species collectively to establish a civilisation based on higher values. We are ultimately free to choose our inner path, and capable of grounding our outer paths, our social lives, on something more than outmoded religion, habitual hatred and violence, and the various ‘opiates’ and ‘isms’ of the past.