Incoherencies

About the Book

“Tropic bird flies the winter skies then homes in through poetic memory.” “Exploring love, loss, and cultural memory through poetry.” What if you spent your childhood on a warm, pristine island, visited every year by birds fleeing the cold north? Or “strange” people from the same clime, “snowbirds” wanting to walk in shorts along your white sandy beaches or swim in your turquoise sea in winter? Some of the birds end up as delicacy on your dinner table; some of the snowbirds buy property and build houses on your island. Then, as you never imagined, you spend most of your life from early adulthood in the land of the winter birds, feathered and human. How do you ever find “home” again, or make sense of the lives you’ve lived? This little book of poetry invites just such a search — a journey to revisit, re-live, understand and appreciate what might have been lost; or to uncover what might have not been lost at all but was always there. Poetry has always been personal and experiential for Richard E. Fawkes — never really intended for publishing or public sharing. So, while he has written and published as a journalist, and even had a play, Facin duh Mirrah, staged in Berkeley, California and Nassau, Bahamas, his poems were always confined to his journals. They were his way of “working out” and “making sense” to himself difficult and trying and, yes, joyous experiences and occurrences in his life and the world around him. It is from these private places and experiences in his life traversing his native Bahamas and the United States of America that incoherencies sprang.

About the Author