Patches of Sunlight: Poetry Collection

Patches of Sunlight

Poetry Collection

Structure and Sequence:

 Patches of Sunlight is my second poetry collection, after Spoken Waves. For this second collection, I often used indentations and structured the sentences to lend a shape to the poems. To enhance the reader's experience, I also added occasional images that relate to the content of the poems. 

Patches of Sunlight is separated into three sections, "Shadow", "Reflection" and "Light". As the cover art alludes to, nature plays a large role in the collection. Aspects of the four elements: fire, water, earth, and air all feature within the collection. Other themes within the collection include but are not limited to: aspects of film and photography, colour, and movement. 

The reader may choose to read the book by skipping around to various poems as they choose, but if you do read the book in order, the difference from the beginning until the end should become apparent. The change is gradual, displaying more vibrancy, colour, light, and energy in each poem by the end, compared to the earlier poems containing stillness, quiet, duller colours, and contrasting shadows. This should give the reader a sense of bleakness, stark surroundings, at the beginning leading them into a path of light, colour, seasons, and gratitude by the end. Of course no journey is a straight line or clearly defined as that, which is why there is weaving in and out of this general trajectory. This is the fun aspect of poetry collections when they are assembled.

A little background behind the poems inspiration:

 I became interested in photography as another form of expression and exploration of nature. I was taking many photos, especially of bees and flowers. I was very interested in learning little photography tricks and experimenting with lighting and colour and reflections which is where the words and concepts of photography and film began to enter into my poems until I felt they were sharing a cohesive theme for a collection.

 (left) camera obscura in Nova Scotia

 (left) flowers in Dartmouth, N.S.

Here are some photos that I took during this time period. They are all taken on my phone, not a special camera in any way. I simply enjoyed taking photos and capturing the scenery around me. I am sure others during this time (2020 to 2022) were finding their own hobbies as related to the restrictions during the Covid pandemic. I took many up close photos of flowers around the yard while we were all meant to stay home. I was also injured during this time period, so I was not going very far early on anyway, regardless of these world-wide restrictions. 

The photos found on this blog post are my own only, taken around the Annapolis Valley for the most part. These photos are not featured in the book, due to the black and white nature of printing text-based books. These photos, even while taken on a simple phone camera, still require a better resolution than the printing would be able to capture, which is why I included more of a "doodle" style art within the collection, using royalty/copyright-free images. 

 
(left) shells at Kingsport beach and waterfall at Baxter's Harbour (right)

Conveying Message through Poetry:

I wanted to have this gradual transition from a sort of ghostly stillness and darkness, slowly warming up and finding sparks of light and energy and excitement. This reflected the sort of healing journey I wanted to portray in this collection in particular. Although it was a personal journey of healing for myself while writing these poems, it later felt like a concept that anyone could relate to in some sense as human beings. 

    People go through various situations and circumstances that can feel dark and scary, but somehow, light will find them again. Whether those experiences are grief, or an injury like me, or maybe a disability that doesn't leave you but you could have positive and negative days, or just a bad situation someone escapes from. Whatever someone is going through, they will keep going. I wanted to convey that difficulty of empowering yourself to move forward and leave the past behind. As a writer, it is not hard for me to imagine other people's life circumstances sometimes, as a journey that they are the main character within that narrative, and it helped me assemble this collection into something to which I felt others could relate.

 (left) Lunenburg area, N.S. in the fog

 (left) Waterfront park N.S., in winter at high tide

I consider myself a very visual person, so I wanted this poetry collection to reflect that way of seeing the world as much as possible. The descriptions of visual places still tells a story alongside the words painting a picture in your mind. The narrative, as with any poetry, is always up to your interpretation, and half the fun of poetry is creating your own personal connections to each piece or poem and finding meaning based on your own experiences. 

Assembling the Collection:

Personally, I really enjoyed titling the poems in the collection. I sometimes title my poems when I write them and other times I will not or will put just a working title on them to be changed later. So when it actually comes time to complete the collection, I study each poem alongside the general theme and adjust my titles accordingly. This part brings me the most joy and satisfaction because it feels so close to completion. It is one of the last steps. Often I already have the collection's full title, and just the individual titles of the poems left to name. This way I can read the table of contents and feel a sense of cohesion within each of the three sections: "Shadow", "Reflection", and "Light". 

"Light" has the largest section at the end, just by glancing at the table of contents, however, these poems are all a mixture in lengths, varying from short to long. I really enjoy having fewer words to say the same thing that a long repetitive poem can say. I can appreciate a long poem, but I know in this day and time, we see a long page of text and cringe, even if after we read it we enjoyed it or learned something from it, the initial view of the long page of text can be off-putting. Being aware of this general dislike for longer pages of text, I chose to include shorter poems and the images within to make it a more fun and lighter experience to read.

 (left) apples on the Harvest Trail, N.S.

 (left) blossoms after the rain, N.S.

Similar to the inside images, the cover art I created from layering various copyright-free images over one another until I had created the cover style I wanted. It is intentionally a little bit blurry, like an out of focus camera. This artistic effect is comparable to when you take photos into the sun and you get a streaming blur or haze all around the light source. The bees around our backyard gave me inspiration to write these poems and combine them into a collection so it was only fitting that they feature on my yellow cover. It felt like an opposing colour pallet to my first poetry book, Spoken Waves, which had a blue colour pallet and had a heavier focus on the ocean. Whereas this second collection, Patches of Sunlight, like the title, had a focus on sunlight and brightness instead. The flowers and honeycomb were another nod to the natural elements contained within the collection. 

To learn more about the overarching concepts in the collection, I have a page in the back of the book which explains more "About the Collection" for those looking for more meaning behind the words. I hope you enjoy my poetry books and feel free to check out any of my other published works.

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