Introduction                                                            Page 6

Love-and-Death, Life-and-Destruction, Truth-and-Darkness will be seen in the

poetry as inseparable and non-oppositional, as relational not as polarities.

Attention will be given to connections and relationships between apparently

opposing forces. This involves giving equal attention to both presence and

absence, to what lies "outside the word", in the spaces and the margins.

As long as there is something else or something other, what is can never

exhaust what might be... .The best for which we can hope is to trace the

after-effect of what is forever elusive in and through the folds, faults

and fissures of language.⁶

Both spirituality and poetry ask that we be attentive to traces and after-effects,

to the elusive, to the absent and to what might be.

⁶ Taylor, RLA Conference,p.87