On Commemoration: Global Reflection upon Remembering War has been reviewed by Professor Jay Winter (Yale) in this week’s Times Literary Supplement. Professor Winter praised the collection for the way it draws attention to ‘the need to extend our catalogue of commemorative forms and sites to include many other media, including literary texts, testimony, music, prayer and silence’.

The key problem the book identifies, Professor Winter suggests, is ‘that of linking remembrance, understood as the process of reflecting on the past, usually but not always with other people; and memory, understood as the product of such reflections each of us carries’.

My research is interested in how trauma interrupts the processing of experience into memory, asking how we can find forms able to express what is often inexpressible. The poems I published in the collection use ink and redaction techniques to engage with these ideas. It’s very gratifying to see these creative-critical engagements, in dialogue with more conventional essays, so well received.

You can purchase On Commemoration here: https://www.peterlang.com/view/title/68826