Anne Cluysenaar

In Timeslips Anne Cluysenaar focuses on slippages - of time, in landscape, and between different ways of life and language. The imagination, continuously and unstoppably transformed, rides the flow of its metaphors into the experiences that underlie our everyday life. In her early poems the slippages are intimate, between the generations and cultures of her own family. 'Timeslips' moves to a large sphere of geological, evolutionary and historical change. The book ends with the twenty-two 'Vaughan Variations': the life and Usk landscape of the seventeenth-century poet Henry Vaughan provide themes for meditations on bilingualism, war, nature and the spiritual resources of poetic form.

From 1850 to the eve of the Civil War, characters attempt to resolve identities, search for salvation, and tried unsuccessfully to escape their imperfect condition by migration.