Catriona Strang expertly "fabricates her own reality" in poems that explore the female condition and respond to Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. In a powerful and rare display of poetic ingenuity, Strang situates classical themes of existentialism, memory, time, and the role of women in two clarifying contexts: the metaphorical mailbox of Proust and the speaker’s own body, as understood in geographical and geological terms.
we need
not gulf
doubt
nor gist-pierce
our place
whatever grip
or drib
we might
or mean
Dear Proust, / You’ve been dawning on me. Gradually, by the charm of all your explanations, our lives have come to be constituted through art. We have made several realities, far beyond the reach of terrible conservative eyes, which grow greater, or are illuminated. Consequence really lives thus, I mean all the time.