Introduction

Arcania, poet’s world – sea, sky, earth scapes were born off a moment during a creative session with Jen last August, who asked us all to fashion our personal inner scapes out of local / known physical ones. Jen started us off with specific concepts and let our poetic minds wander for each section. Such exercise was taken as self-indulgence and started off with a piece of verse entitled Snapshots from Arcania.

Yet Arcania represents more than the poet’s world to me. For all I know, it is the very fabric of the shore I walk on a daily basis, virtually free of mind pollution, or chains and feel more real as it brings me closer to earth, the real world.

I once mentioned an earlier life experienced south of the border; needed and yet compartmented, obeying to specific laws, system in which we lost ourselves… By walking away from this kind of materialistic world, we learnt to appreciate each sunrise; the taste of salt glued on our lips, the way wind talks through breeze or gale, folk work and speak…rawness of land and elements, the way we fit inside it all. It’s like learning to live again.