Destiny Manifest

The poems in this collection were written over a 10-year period, beginning with ’Springtime in the Rockies’. This poem was sparked by an incident in 2014 where a bowhunter shot and killed a bull moose in an area where the animals had become habituated to people. The title of the collection is based on the 19th-century ideology, ’Manifest Destiny’, the belief that God gave white Americans the right to expand westward across the North American continent. This belief had devastating consequences for the native inhabitants, for the wildlife and for the land. The belief was also deeply patriarchal, equating masculine with conquest, and the land with a wild, feminized space that needed to be subjugated. It is a twisted ideology (hence the inversion of the title) given renewed credence under the current US administration.'There is a painful tension in the word manifest and its association with destinies that these arresting poems confront in their ten years of writing. On the one hand a brutal seizing and violence: the plundering of US settler history, the extractive logics decimating our planet. On the other, what of the living world chooses to make itself known to the poem, despite. Like the lichen found growing on a bough, these are poems of delicate adjustment and occupation, which pull ’toward the guardrails/of elegy’ even as they offer up something to adhere to, not force, but ’a gentle coaxing, in the interest of life’.'-Carol Watts'Nancy Gaffield’s new poetry collection is a profound philosophical journey that places the margins at the centre. By replacing the main narrative with footnotes, marginalia, and para-texts, the work reveals the messy, non-linear collage of truth-weaving: a process of perception oscillating between illumination and obscurity, defined by the cumulative momentum of loss. The speaker’s stoic resolve anchors the text with an invisible ’I’ perpetually moving, navigating spacetime as a field of simultaneous experiences while functioning as a crossroads - the exact point, in flux, where destiny and reality, or perhaps origo and destination, intersect. The poems intensely examine and inhabit this profound yet shifting position of being, propelled forward by a sense of impending catastrophe.' -Ágnes Lehóczky