Slipping By

The title of this collection of A. S. Kline’s poetry, ‘Slipping By’, is a description both of the flow of nature all around us, and the manner in which living things often elude and evade us, so that we neither truly see nature nor truly value the marvellous strangeness of life itself. Our lives too are transient, and time forever slipping past us, yet we are challenged by that very brevity of being, which feels equally strange, and by the intentionless, nature of the universe in which we exist, to face our unasked-for responsibility. We are obliged to create not only our own purpose and meaning, but also to create and choose the values that inform them, and to do so as part of the species and with no guarantee of personal success in our efforts. That freedom is both a blessing and a curse, since it leaves us free of external purpose, and liberates our imaginations as to the future, while weighting us with an innate angst and an ever-present consciousness of the constraints of our contemporary human condition and our history. These poems rooted in nature, exhort us not to be trapped in the past but to be open to what is best in what we have achieved as a species, and to aspire to more.