A collection of poems about love and how it touches all aspects of our lives. Never flinching from truth, Edward Carson demonstrates all the brutal honesties and shapes of his subject. Love, too, comes in a multitude of shapes which we learn to sometimes embrace, and sometimes repel.
Taking Shape is about love, its powerful personal history, its public geography and geology, how it changes, how it shifts itself into different forms and temporalities, and how love profoundly alters an individual’s point of view and the world at large.
Through love we belong to, and are separate from each other in ways like no other parts and phases of our existence; through it the language of our imaginations are nourished and transformed. Like nature’s elusive electrons, the paths love takes are continually altered and given new direction by the knowledge, questions and feelings we bring to it.
Finally, Taking Shape is also about the nature of shape, how the very form or vessel, like language itself, persuades us to take on as well as escape from the many breathtaking landscapes and mysteries, clues and possibilities of our shared lives.