Soft Shroud: excerpts from a long poem

Soft Shroud is a 32 page poem in which ‘a debtor undoes a suicide’. The poem creates a journey in which the debtor moves ‘from graveyard excavation / to floating ova’. Opening passages are located at an imaginary version of Grafton Bridge, Auckland. Soft Shroud uses this public landscape as both a scaffold and a jumping off point for somatic exploration, personal but not private or even individual. The poem begins with an excavation of covered losses, and over the whole becomes a migration in bodily time from enshrouded wound to eruptive making. Explorations move from the vacuum space of the suicide to images of volcanic lability and plenitude. Revision of the manuscript has involved cutting, extension and rearrangement, as well as the development of titles, a contents page, bridging notes and footnotes to explore the poem’s textual sources.
This paper consists of sections from the beginning of the poem with accompanying notes, followed by a brief discussion of the poem’s development process.