From a Refugee of Tristan Da Cunha

Knowers, avoid this book. Your certainties will not be reflected in this collection of songs, rants, raids and runs into the chaos. This is a book for seekers and lovers and no love escapes the pain of its slow demise into fiction, friendship. or fury. This book is dedicated to failure, fault, feeling and the last joy of the survivor. Redemption may not be possible but acceptance is the recommended refuge for the high flyer, and memory the adventurer's accomplice.

This book is for those who have lived, have taken risks, have strong opinions, high ideals and criminal inclinations. But no crime without poetry. No cruelty without empathy. No reconnaissance into the human hive without contradiction on deck and paradox filling the sails. The human animal is a tumultuous beast, requiring both the rule of law, and the law of unruly freedom to thrive. But those who seek freedom find that they don't fit in a world where conformity is mistaken for kindness and security based on a fear to offend.

A refugee is someone who is driven out or doesn't fit. By necessity, choice or by nature, the dissenter questions and is skeptical of the answers. The pilgrim may not know what he is looking for, but is unwilling to accept less than he seeks. The voice in these poems wanders from mood to mode, vivid, grandiose or vulgar, enchanted as angry, boisterous and timid in turn. The explorer doesn't try to cover his tracks. He tries to leave footprints in his own mud so that an imperfect person pushing through the underbrush is revealed.

The people of Tristan da Cunha, the most remote inhabited archipelago on earth, left their island in 1961 when a long dormant volcano exploded and buried their land in a paroxysm of molten lava. Exiled in Britain, speaking an archaic version of English, they were unable to adjust, and eventually returned to their barren island in the South Atlantic. Their exodus, out and back, serves as the starting point for this exploration of