After living with these poems for more than a year, I’ve started to see the person inside them more clearly — not the real me exactly, but the outline of someone I once allowed to speak.
That person has good qualities.
They pay attention. They know how to listen for the small sounds: the hiss of disinfectant, the tremor of glassware, the shuffle of passengers settling into seats. They look carefully, maybe too carefully, and turn each detail into a kind of evidence. There’s tenderness in that, and humour too — a quiet irony that keeps sentiment from tipping over.
They also understand the strange ethics of travel. How beauty and guilt can sit side by side at a buffet table. How privilege can shimmer like sea light, easy to admire, hard to ignore. I like that about them — their moral curiosity, their unwillingness to look away.
But there are flaws too.
This poet, this traveller, sometimes hides behind the act of noticing. They stay a little too safe, too composed, always the watcher and rarely the one watched. The voice can become too even, too polite, like a dinner conversation that never quite gets personal.
And sometimes they list the world instead of living in it.
The poems start collecting things — sunsets, cocktails, towels — until the rhythm turns static, as if observation alone could replace experience.
Still, I don’t dislike this version of myself. They were trying to be honest, and to be kind. Maybe they were learning how to see.
If the next poems are different — more sprawling, less well-behaved, full of weather and interruption — it’s because I’ve stepped back into the middle of life. The watcher is still there somewhere, scanning the horizon, but the poems will have to make room now for the person who keeps missing the boat.
Rodney Wood 