Hugger Mugger

Seán Haldane's previous collections of poems have been in chronological order. But there are two chronologies: the order in which poems are written, and the order of the events they describe. For example there are six poems in The Memory Tree (2015) which concern events before The Coast and Inland (1968). Haldane has written poems set in Italy while living in Canada, poems set in Canada while living in England. His longest collection so far, Always Two (2010), contains about 280 poems set in four European countries, the USA, and six Canadian provinces. Since this is a selection, not a collection, he has felt free to organise the poems in a loose chronological order of writing, and to put poems which 'belong' together - whether in place, time, or person - in separate sections. The last section includes recent poems which have been set in song cycles by the Canadian composers James Moffet (Poems of Absence) and David Jaeger (The Echo Cycle).