Erosions is John A. Griffin’s first full-length book of poems.
Written shortly after he emigrated to the United States, the poems
comprise a kind of Bildungsroman exploring themes of boyhood innocence,
fantasy, landscapes, nature, death, loss, absence, exile, and a coming
into one’s powers as one seeks to apprehend the changes wrought by time,
epiphany, and departure. Absence, lines, natural forces, spirituality,
and extinction are all leitmotifs in the book, as these combine to
displace a burgeoning identity rather than overtly defining one. Erosions
seeks to lyricize those forces that shape emerging consciousness and
sensibility, so that the aural semantics of the poems are as essential
to their decoding as the verbal, linguistic semantics, and it is this
stress on the music and rhythms of language the poet hopes will evoke
their core and abiding meaning.