Witness in Stone - Esther Phillips

This collection explores the fragile territory between remembering and forgetting, both as an individual experience and in the life of a society. If in the end all is subject to “time’s slow bleed”, these poems enact the capacity of the imagination “to pass through ancient walls” and to reorder failures long gone in time into more hopeful connections. Poems recreate those childhood moments when physical presences, such as the “great house” at Drax Hall provoke the “beginning of poetry”, the searching for what is “hidden in the dark”, and thence to a grasp of the history that society would rather forget. For while forgetting is human, the collection also explores how amnesia can be cultivated in society as a means of hiding the sources of contemporary privilege and economic power.