Blind Rain: Poems

The poems in BLIND RAIN transform the known and familiar into something surreal and new. With spare, unadorned language, Bond complicates what it is to be both bound to the world and yet free within that world, the way in which the imagination deepens our engagements and yet offers some measure of distance at the same time. The collection opens with several elegies, many of which concern the last days and death of his father. Later poems explore the power of imaginative response as compensation for loss, focusing on poetry, madness, and music, which paradoxically consoles, since it is a form of loss itself. BLIND RAIN includes "The Return," a long meditation that hinges on the double sense of the word "true" as suggesting both "the real" and "the loyal," and so participates, often through personal and cultural narrative, in a postmodern conversation about the power of returning as a way of grounding us ethically and emotionally to the world at hand.