Art Of Navigation
"Art of Navigation makes a potential architecture of the heart in swifts and herons. These volatile, heraldic creatures appear like a quickening in the poem and speak of a correspondence of parts in which the family of man is suspended in the net of nature, psyche, and cosmos."- Wilson Harris writing on Andrew Jefferson-Miles's book of poetry, Art of Navigation.
Price
£7.99
Author(s)
Andrew Jefferson-Miles
ISBN number
9781900715416
Pages
64
Price
£7.99
Classification
Poetry
Country setting
Guyana
Publication date
01 May 2002

Acknowledging an inheritance fostered in the seed-bed of Guyana, land of six peoples and transitional territory between the Caribbean and Amerindian South America, Andrew Jefferson-Miles's Art of Navigation comprises three poems exploring the community of man and his expeditions in imagination and reality. Legend, myth, and intuition find equal footing with Heidegger, quantum physics and qualitative theory. 

'Art of Navigation', the title poem, is the dreaming and redreaming of potent new frameworks for history. It follows, through different histories, man's ongoing search for an undiscovered continent. Two currents in the poem meet and merge: one, official, like the chain of events which constitute a written history; the other to be found in those overlooked links which slip away, tantalizingly, to resettle in the seed-bed of the culture. 'Sestina of Sestina's' explores the echoes of landscape between Wales and the poet's remembered Guyana in ways which tap Jefferson-Miles's sense of his cross-cultural inheritance, whilst 'Malory' transplants Gwendolyn and Myrddin (Merlin) from an ancient Celtic myth (which has resonances with Amerindian myth) into the twentieth century, and travel by train, writing a new text for an ancient fragment to position the reader in a new configuration with the world.

Andrew Jefferson-Miles is a poet and artist.

Variations

Andrew Jefferson-Miles

Andrew Jefferson-Miles is a poet and painter. Andrew's publications include The Esplumeoir (poetry, Journal of Caribbean Literatures, 2001), Art of Navigation (poetry, Peepal Tree Press 2003), The Timehrian (novel, Peepal Tree Press 2002).
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