LANDSCAPe oF ShaDoW

Shadow as companion, comforter, creator, questioner, stalker, ghost, exile, demon, and destroyer

Words: DOMENICO COSTANTINI

“Landscape of Shadows”, investigates shadow’s force as a metaphoric mirror, as material for parable. It tracks the kind of thinking that is done with shadow, and in shadow, how we put shadows to use. Shadow becomes a metaphor for the work of imagination and dream, an image of mental and physical refuge and yet also an image of death, or fear of death, as well as of the darker regions of doubt and fear. It measures absence and presence, but also memory and futurity, the shapes of time. The history of how cast shadows acquire in poetry a mysterious substance, a personality, a creaturely life, how a thing by nature secondary and passing grabs at something like authority, even a kind of originality, becomes itself a source of life, an inward principle rather than an outward accident.

“Many small shadows come together to make one powerful thing.”