Art of Navigation

Acknowledging an inheritance fostered in the seed-bed of Guyana, land of six peoples and transitional territory between the Caribbean and Amerindian South America, Andrew Jefferson-Miles's Art of Navigation comprises three poems exploring the community of man and his expeditions in imagination and reality. Legend, myth, and intuition find equal footing with Heidegger, quantum physics and qualitative theory.

'Art of Navigation', the title poem, is the dreaming and redreaming of potent new frameworks for history. It follows, through different histories, man's ongoing search for an undiscovered continent. Two currents in the poem meet and merge: one, official, like the chain of events which constitute a written history; the other to be found in those overlooked links which slip away, tantalizingly, to resettle in the seed-bed of the culture.

'Sestina of Sestina's' explores the echoes of landscape between Wales and the poet's remembered Guyana in ways which tap Jefferson-Miles's sense of his cross-cultural inheritance, whilst 'Malory' transplants Gwendolyn and Myrddin (Merlin) from an ancient Celtic myth (which has resonances with Amerindian myth) into the twentieth century, and travel by train, writing a new text for an ancient fragment to position the reader in a new configuration with the world.

Andrew Jefferson-Miles is a poet and artist.