Exile in My Homeland

Book excerpt: Exile In My Home Land, though an autonomous poem, develops from two previous long poems by Dale Jacobson, Factories and Cities and A Walk by the River, bringing together their manifestly separate themes, history and politics on one hand, and metaphysical questions of loss and mortality on the other. Ranging through the poet’s personal experience, the poem confronts the destructive as well as constructive forces operating beyond our individual control that nonetheless define our lives. Working from the author’s childhood as a reference, the poem wants to make sense of these various powers, often ruthless and absolute, which present themselves as either human constructions such as war, or the inexorable forces of nature. In writing about nature or mortality, poets tend to exclude history and politics as if they are irrelevant. This poem sweeps beyond those conventional esthetical limitations, drawing connections between all these themes of nature, history, politics and mortality, using the backdrop of the author’s personal experience. The poem explores these enormous powers, and our perception of them, as we struggle to determine our place in the universe.