Background Radiation

Many of the poems in Background Radiation deal with mystery and history. The characters in the poems often possess a "double vision," as if one eye were focused on the mystery of the cosmos, the other eye on the cycle of human creation and destruction that is history. Some of the poems are contemplative or mystical in the sense that they try to express - or at least to suggest - the inexpressible and inconceivable origin of the universe. The title Background Radiation refers to the radiation that's left over from the Big Bang. The radiation is a kind of language - a set of signals - that represents the distant past and the mysterious creation itself. The poems bear witness to numerous incidents from the more recent past, such as the violent conflicts between Native Americans and European settlers in early America, Cold War face-offs between the U.S. and U.S.S.R, that attacks of September 11th, and the Iraq War. Some of the more personal poems recount the history of my ancestors who were missionaries and explorers in China and Mongolia during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Many of the poems offer an ecological perspective of the world as a small planet full of natural beauty that is gradually being destroyed for the sake of "progress."