SIV CEDERING

Did I begin to write poems with a seascape after I moved to the East End of Long Island or did I move here because of the seascapes growing in my poems? Perhaps I can dismiss the chicken and egg question by stating that I believe a person who has known and loved one landscape has it within herself to transfer that attachment to another kind of landscape.

Born inland, by the Arctic Circle in Sweden, it might seem strange that I feel at home by the Amagansett shore and in the small villages out here, and that my new poems have adopted a coastal landscape. “On This Shore,” which refers to an ocean crossing by a balloon that ascended from The Springs, was written before I moved out here. So was “Fata Morgana,” which is set on a mythic shore. But my new work is made of real waves and real sand, dune grass and scallop shells.

Not until I recently was asked if the landscape has influenced my writing did I realize that it had. The word topic comes from the Greek word for place. Maybe this is the reason why the landscape that surrounds me surfaces in my work, perhaps not as topic, but as the embodiment of the spirit that insists that the poem becomes a poem.