Without a Philosophy

Elizabeth Seydel Morgan's Without a Philosophy explores the times when a clear solution does not exist, when we find ourselves in "those darknesses between," where life appears nothing like certainty. In poems about the illness and death of a beloved man, the speaker asks the unanswered questions that are inevitably raised by the experience of grief, about the "impossibility of gauging distances" between souls. We see a life without pure knowledge of the truth as "we're either learning more each day / Or slantedly misled." Yet, there is affirmation here of a life of the imagination and a life of love.