Poetry is all about communication. It’s the vehicle through which we communicate our thoughts and ideas, our delights and pains, to people we will probably never meet. In a good poem, the material in our mind is translated into a pattern of words that is both comprehensible and interesting. The reader ingests these words, and a response emerges.
There’s an additional layer to the concept of communication in Synerg y, where the poem is communicating a message about communication. It’s the moving, but never sentimental, account of someone with dementia and the solace he finds in the company of a cat.
There are plenty of poems about people with dementia. There are plenty of poems about cats. Putting the two elements
