'A path headed off underneath a row of low-lying bushes, below the tangle of old trees, small splashes of yellow paint indicating a direction of sorts, and silvery rays of light revealed a creek moving under the branches. And, for you, behind it all there was this conviction that something would always lead somewhere – as if feeling the sun for one moment on your body wasn’t enough ...
'Ideas of Travel builds in significant ways on Peter Boyle's previous two books, his award-winning Enfolded in the Wings of a Great Darkness and Notes Towards the Dreambook of Endings. This collection again taps into a deep dreamlike symbolism and directs this to great existential effect. Even staying still we are travelling—across the seasons, across the day, across a life. Written over fourteen months of the pandemic, Ideas of Travel subverts the boundaries between the living and the dead, the human and the non-human, ourselves and others. In this sequence of 140 new poems acclaimed poet Peter Boyle examines our sense of what it is to be alive.' (Publication summary)
'Like his 2019 book, Enfolded in the Wings of a Great Darkness, this new work suggests itself as at least a kind of diary by giving the dates “September 2020 – November 2021” at its conclusion. It differs from that earlier book, of course, in that the former was really a grief-diary, marked by responses to loss. Ideas of Travel records poems made during the pandemic but makes no specific reference to those times apart from choosing, as its focus, the idea of travel, one of the great losses of the period. In fact, one might read the title as a humorous take on the cliché that, since “real” travel is denied us, we might profitably choose to focus a little more on “inner” travels: read some books, play board games with the family, etc. The very choice of the word, “travel”, over the more poetically acceptable synonym, “journeying”, in the title leads me to think that Boyle might have had that irritating cliché in mind when he found a name for the collection. Significantly, the word “travel” doesn’t occur in any of the one hundred and forty poems that make up the book.' (Introduction)
'Like his 2019 book, Enfolded in the Wings of a Great Darkness, this new work suggests itself as at least a kind of diary by giving the dates “September 2020 – November 2021” at its conclusion. It differs from that earlier book, of course, in that the former was really a grief-diary, marked by responses to loss. Ideas of Travel records poems made during the pandemic but makes no specific reference to those times apart from choosing, as its focus, the idea of travel, one of the great losses of the period. In fact, one might read the title as a humorous take on the cliché that, since “real” travel is denied us, we might profitably choose to focus a little more on “inner” travels: read some books, play board games with the family, etc. The very choice of the word, “travel”, over the more poetically acceptable synonym, “journeying”, in the title leads me to think that Boyle might have had that irritating cliché in mind when he found a name for the collection. Significantly, the word “travel” doesn’t occur in any of the one hundred and forty poems that make up the book.' (Introduction)
