The poems in Migration Patterns were written from 1987 to 1996, in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Kansas. Place figures prominently in several of the poems: Merchantville, New Jersey, is my childhood home; I attended college at both The Pennsylvania State University at State College, and The University of Kansas at Lawrence. The landscapes of South Jersey and Eastern Kansas, while quite distinct from one another (the nearest ocean to Kansas lies 1500 miles away), share similarities of terrain, climate, and general atmosphere; these connections manifest through the poems as a blending of physical landscapes.

Like the topographic oceans and plains of my homes, the titles of this collection have shifted over time. Originally entitled Cooper St. Musings, for the street and hospital in Camden, New Jersey, where I worked for three years, this title ceded to The Closer Side of Night sometime around 1990. The Closer Side of Night placed too much emphasis on the poem of the same name, and I changed it to Crucible and Prism in the summer of 1995. I similarly remained uncomfortable with the weight and focus that "Crucible and Prism" would bear as the title poem to the volume, and settled on Migration Patterns late in the spring of 1996.

I organize the poems into three parts, as they function differently in each section. As a whole, the poems trace the cycle of day into night into day again. While some poems could reasonably appear in any of the three parts, this arrangement maximizes the organic flow from section to section that allows the poems to speak to one another. That is, echoes from one poem resonate forward and backward through the remaining sections and draw the work more closely together as a whole. "Heartstone," for example, reaches back from the center of Migration Patterns to part one and recalls "The Flood," "Matriarch," and "Whitman's Winter"; simultaneously it foreshadows the closing sequence of part three, from "Sky and Ocean" to "The Wall," and remains the hurricane eye around which the whole churns.

The experiences that have drawn me closer to darkness form the basis for part one, "The Flood of Night." Whether autobiographical, mythic, or fictional, the poetic events in the first section spawn from a dark core, a world in eclipse. "The Flood of Night" details a reality of spiritual darkness, a destroyed innocence coupled with the inability to build anew, or even to repair that which exists, from which the reader catapults into part two. "Dreamscapes," the second part, fragments into a series of five sequences, each of which examines a reality denied in part one, a reality that may fully exist in only the imagination. These apparations and nightmares, dreams and visions, bridge the gap between the perceived and the actual, the terrifyingly real and the beatifically possible. Simultaneously, part two remolds the reader as a creator who mends the chaos of part two and transfigures the reality of part one into part three. The final third, "Seekings," returns the reader to the world of part one, but to a world redefined; the imagination unleashed in part two offers a renewed perception of the world, and concludes in the movement of the volume from night into day, from decay into rebirth. Elements from all three sections appear throughout the volume, and indicate the intertwining movement of the whole: the darkness of part one remains, even in part three, just as hope from the latter emits a dim radiance in part one; the fantastic elements of part two are confined therein only insofar as they bleed into the sections on either side.

Go to "The Flood," the first poem in Migration Patterns.