Bildungsroman

Bildungsroman can be read as a semi-narrative account of an artist who attempts to produce work that appears intermittently, opening up insights into the human condition and the current state of life as lived not only by the artist but by others as well. As a narrative, this collection of poems commemorates the death of the King, the cessation of war and the benefits of the human imagination. The title of the book evokes the Modernist practice of challenging the conventional division between poetry and prose. The speaker is not always the writer but usually derives insights from the writer’s life. The poems have been arranged in groups that roughly follow the dates of composition, with the first two groups going back three decades and the final group having been written during the past ten years.