Photo by Hengki-Lee
I started a chapbook in mid-March, just when I was made temporarily redundant like so many others,
and it seems it has come to an end. So, either I change track and start an entirely new work, or I
continue on with the present work and just broaden it out into a much larger collection, which is
a real possibility. Plague literature has been around since Lucretius, and probably even earlier. I
don't see what some people have against it. Daniel Defoe wrote about the great plague of London,
fictitiously penning it as a survivor and so helped create the first modern novel in A Journal of
the Plague Year which was Albert Camus's template for his La Peste an allegorical account of
the Nazi occupation. So plague literature has always been around, I haven't even mentioned
Boccaccio and his Decameron.
For poets the topic is a wonderful one, as you can concentrate on the great theme of death
normally reserved for eulogies, giving it the epic dimension one ordinarily would disdain. I
really went for it in this one Quarantine. I have been following the news pretty well, particularly
in the USA, the figure of Trump and his mishandling of the crisis is the stuff of pure
nightmare. I have also been transversing a lot of Baudelaire, so combine the two and
what I came up with was the following. This is the second of my pandemic poems
that Pendemic have published, the last was Corona which featured a couple of weeks
back. Many thanks to them. I love the image by Hengki-Lee above, it just seems to capture
the mood of the times so well.
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