THE FORGOTTEN SHORE, POETRY BOOK

This book of poetry, The Forgotten Shore by J. P. Linstroth, represents a labour of love. It was pieced together here and there from years of writing poetry. Some of the poems herein are old, while others are much newer. None of them have been previously published. In my mind, and on the page, I have tried to create a “mental landscape” for the reader, which is representative of my life, my past loves, and present amorous interests, my interests in nature, my fascination with art (both as an artist and as an observer), and my fascination with indigenous peoples, as well as my research in the Spanish Basque Country and the Brazilian Amazon. To borrow from Michel Foucault, herein is a created world, an “archaeology of knowledge,” if you will. While unlike Foucault, I am not trying to analyze or interpret institutions or power, rather, this book is more of an “archaeology of emotions”. Whereby the reader is asked to excavate through landscapes of emotions and observations forming what is in many ways both a complete and yet incomplete encapsulation of my experiences. In my poetry writing, I borrow heavily from Greek mythology as metaphorical reference and as a means of capturing my most personal emotions. For I have gone through divorce, loved and lost, and even so, loved once again. Such is life. To me referencing ancient Greek thought through their mythology somehow brings the reader back to the classics and the very foundations of Western thought. Of course, I am not alone in this endeavor. This is well trodden territory in the history of poetry. The book is titled, The Forgotten Shore, for good reason. It is representative of a sort of mythical place, a place where love is lost, on the one hand, and may not be re-encountered. Maybe it is a desolate island—a shoreline, a beach, somewhere to be left after a relationship, discarded like drift wood. And yet, on the other hand, there is inherent in this conceptualization a sense of hope. This latter perspective may not be altogether obvious to the reader. While love is lost, and one may find oneself lonely on a so-called “forgotten shore,” and perhaps abandoned, there is, nevertheless, hope of leaving such a place and finding love elsewhere. At least, this is the implication in my mind. Sometimes love leaves us on “forgotten shores”. The immediate afterthoughts are we may never find such love again. No future love could possibly match what we have lost and so on. But this is untrue. Love may be found again. We somehow find so-called other soulmates and intimate connections. Yet, these are the immediate emotions which come to mind. All of us at one point or other in our lives have had feelings of loneliness and abandon- ment, feelings of loss and so forth—and as such these emotions form a major part of this book of poetry.