The Other Side of Silence

The title of this collection of A S. Kline’s poetry is a phrase taken from George Eliot’s novel ‘Middlemarch’. This side of silence lies the world of noise, the social world of our civilisation. On the other side of silence lie the inner personal worlds of unspoken thought and imagination, and the silence of nature and the universe which, lacking mind and language to speak or hear, remain intrinsically alien to us however familiar elements of them may become. Equally silent are the creatures, often agonisingly close but still far from coherent speech, whose worlds we endeavour unsuccessfully to fully penetrate, though they co-exist with us, and share our history, like the plants, trees and flowers. Speculative poetry, of the kind presented here, lies on the boundary of language, looking back towards society and the species, and outwards towards the many worlds of being that we cannot directly experience.