Böcker av David Appelbaum

This is a book of poems to remember those for whom 'time had lapsed.' The poems begin innocently with common collections, rocks or coins, and progressively, become memories that gather the death in the folds of language, to commemorate the passage. The words are most forceful for those closest to the heart of the narrator. The poems mourn a secret bond with each lost one. In the work of grief, special harmonies in poetry open the soul to the transcendent joy of simply being.

Portuguese Sailor Boy is a fragmentary history of the bloodline of the Portuguese explorer, Vasco de Gamma. The bloodline motif plays out in a series of scenes of an unnamed contemporary relation-in symbolic forms like nautical maps and paint-by-numbers frigates. The narrative centers on the wayfaring of his character, which reveals a life of accidental achievement as well as unadvertised follies, and neither ascends nor descends to an end.