Poetry After Auschwitz

The critic Theodor Adorno famously declared that ‘writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric’, and there is no shortage of brutality today, to challenge the intrinsic beauty and relevance of poetry. In these poems, which draw on his experience of working in some of the world’s troubled places, Vernon exploits the energy created in the convergence of and collision between form, ideas, music and emotion, to explore what poetry offers. Reaching out to real and imagined figures from past and present, from near and far, he considers how the brushstroke of history touches us all, and what remains of us, each in our particular landscape, after the brush has passed. He examines the changes wrought on people and peoples by others and by circumstance, and the tension between our deep human connection across time and space, and the fundamental impermanence we cannot elude. In the end he seems to say that ultimately, all we can be certain of is uncertainty. And perhaps we should find a way to be content with that.