Almanac Poetry: This/That
The Sea of Ice, by Caspar David. Friedrich, oil on canvas, 1823/4. Hamburger Kunsthalle, Germany. [Wikimedia Commons.]
This/That?
Lion and Rose?
Tiger and Fleur-de-Lys?
Headstone and Yew Tree?
Styx and Shangri-La?
A monster on a funeral pyre
floating in a sea of ice?
Read more from Kevin Densley HERE
Kevin Densley’s latest poetry collection, Please Feed the Macaws…I’m Feeling Too Indolent, is available HERE
Read more Almanac Poetry HERE
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About
Kevin Densley is a graduate of both Deakin University and The University of Melbourne. He has taught writing and literature in numerous Victorian universities and TAFES. He is a poet and writer-in-general. His fifth book-length poetry collection, Please Feed the Macaws ... I'm Feeling Too Indolent, was published in late 2023 by Ginninderra Press. He is also the co-author of ten play collections for young people, as well as a multi Green Room Award nominated play, Last Chance Gas, which was published by Currency Press. Other writing includes screenplays for educational films.
Love your poem KD, simple yet powerful.
I didn’t know the painting or artist but looking at it here, juxtaposed with your poem I am in awe. It is deeply melancholic underlining the relationship between humans and nature.
For some reason the John Prine song, Christmas in Prision comes to mind, another story of a bleak, isolated environment. JPs song offers hope through the protagonist’s yearning for human connection.
Among other things, What I like about your question marks is that it lets the reader wrestle with the deepest of conundrum – how to reconcile nature and nurture.
Cheers
Thanks so much, Rick, for your detailed response to my poem. I’m so pleased it resonated with you as it did.
Caspar David Friedrich’s work constitutes the high point in German Romanticism in visual art, the way I see it.
The sea of ice reference in the last line of my poem alludes to both to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and an Australian opera based on the novel, Mer de Glace (i.e. ‘Sea of Ice’). I loved the French language of the opera’s title so much that I had to use it somewhere, and this poem got the guernsey.
Finally, I’ll have to give Prine’s song a listen.