Poetry. The poems in COLLECTING SILENCE leap and startle. In searing images, they explore both "the unbearable weight" and joy, as life arcs through youth to maturation to aging. These are poems that draw on Narwani's experience of growing up in Canada in a Baltic-German family forced to emigrate from their homeland Latvia. Throughout, the poems converse with the Pieta, the "Mona Lisa" and Magritte's "The False Mirror." Always Narwani listens for what bridges boundaries, separations, for the inner home that sustains and renews us. In an age of non-stop chatter, these poems remind us of our power to listen, reshape and transform. It is in our silences, she says, that memories, our deepest experiences, talk to us in a language "we all know without speaking."
