Though Lovers Be Lost

"I have folded Dalí's clock, draping time's dressing gown over the foot of her bed," writes the poet as he sits beside his mother's bed on his last visit to her in hospital. She lies there, unconscious, and the poet, looking at her fragile frame, wonders "Is the human body a chest of drawers to be opened and closed at will and things removed?" Though Lovers Be Lost begins with these direct links to Salvador Dalí's brand of surrealism and continues in this same poem with a leading statement from the surrealist manifesto: "On the operating table, a sewing machine and a bread knife wait inside a black umbrella for their next victim." Unfortunately for the poet, that victim will be his mother. The book's title echoes Dylan Thomas's poem "And death shall have no dominion." Also born in Swansea, Wales, Roger Moore is an award-winning writer of poetry and short stories. His poetic world of wild Welsh words is well-suited to the exploration, in the language of metaphor and magic, of the relationship between life, death, and the natural world that thrives in Wales and the Canada to which he emigrated. "Though lovers be lost, love shall not," writes Dylan Thomas, and, in this outstanding collection of poems about the triumph of love over death, Roger Moore, the Welsh-Canadian poet, agrees with his mentor.