Condition of Fire

Ovid wrote his famous stories of change just before being banished from the Roman home that he loved, and after travelling throughout Italy, observing its many diverse and vibrant landscapes, probably including the volcanic Aeolian Isles where volcanoes would throw molten lava into turquoise seas, whipped by the winds of the god who made his home there. It was to these rapturous, Edenic and violently creative islands that JL Williams ventured to write the poems in this collection, poems inspired both directly by Ovid's tales and informing a new story that emerges from the old-a post-apocalyptic vision of the earth where metamorphoses engender rebirth from the ashen wasteland that man has made of the world. Ovid expressed the truth that to change is to survive, and this message erupts out of the poems in Condition of Fire, whose language and images strive to communicate in new ways the essential elements of myth, creation and the burning breath of being.