Memory and the Past

Over the course of the poems collected in the sections “Playland” and “The Lost World,” the author considers the ways in which memory and the past define the individual’s relationship with the present. The following analysis will present a discrete number of examples of such poetic and thematic explorations. In a poem like “Mission and Outpost,” the speaker finds his time in a West Coast city conjuring memories of his former friend and loved one. Although the place reminds him of other times, he remarks that there is “no confirmation / tonight of memory’s emulsion: only flashes of men I’ve known” (4). Throughout the poem, he tries to envision himself “on this date / in this same spot twenty years before,” but his memory falters and his “imagination sags beneath the weight / of disappointment” (5). His physical environs feel like a possible portal into...