Erosions - John Griffin

Erosions is John A. Griffin’s first full-length book of poems. Written shortly after he emigrated to the United States, the poems comprise a kind of Bildungsroman exploring themes of boyhood innocence, fantasy, landscapes, nature, death, loss, absence, exile, and a coming into one’s powers as one seeks to apprehend the changes wrought by time, epiphany, and departure. Absence, lines, natural forces, spirituality, and extinction are all leitmotifs in the book, as these combine to displace a burgeoning identity rather than overtly defining one. Erosions seeks to lyricize those forces that shape emerging consciousness and sensibility, so that the aural semantics of the poems are as essential to their decoding as the verbal, linguistic semantics, and it is this stress on the music and rhythms of language the poet hopes will evoke their core and abiding meaning.