Currents of the World: Poems

Naturalists are cut out for poetry. The ambience of the world of Nature, the opportunity for solitude nourishes the spirit. In Quinn Bailey’s debut collection The Currents of the Worldhe delights in time and space to reflect. His unhurriedness allows ‘To learn to stand alone knowing that everyone/You’ve ever loved or ever will love has nothing/You can actually keep.’ His emotion recalls Tennyson’s In Memoriam, the memory of his friend Hallam, who drowned:
‘tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.’

And he admits the universal conflict between the desire for freedom and ‘the longing for the steady rhythm of settling/For the constant and the reliable….’

Only in The Desire of the Night and The Laughing Revolution is the reader caught up in poetic mystery, not quite obtuse, but nor wholly simple, and not even a wisp of deception.

Reading poetry, even such mildly cathartic verse as this author’s, urges the reader to commiserate or simply enjoy. ‘Tideline,’ almost the final poem in the most memorable: ‘Is there any/Greater healer/Than being licked clean/By the salty tongue of the ocean.