Brief Summer in the Hinterland

Relentlessly, it seems, we examine and re-examine ourselves and our complex relationships to one another and the ongoing dramas of our lives, while forgetting the context in which all relationships take place. It''s the buzz-whatever beeps or flickers insistently enough-that claims our attention. And we unwittingly evolve to become what we most attend. How easy it is to believe ourselves distinct and apart from our tidy notions of "environment" and "natural world." Yet we cannot insist upon this separation without damaging consequences like those that now, equally insistently, threaten us. When we remove ourselves from the buzz, it becomes clear that we are of the environment, not outside it. The environment is in us, as we are in it. The hinterlands exist as those back countries that stubbornly stand sentinel around, above, and below us. When our thin veneers of habit and culture are stripped away, there remains the elemental. The rhythms, the solitude, the vast mental and emotional spaces graciously bestowed by the oceans and forests are fixed firmly upon our being. Not surprisingly, the poems in this collection, though they often feature the timeless complexities of human relationships, invariably play out against the firm backdrop of full context, of place-the hinterlands.