The Muse of Exile

Abstract

The Muse of Exile sings of lost landscapes, lost homes. She sings in my poems and in my family stories of escape from the Nazis. She sings in Adam David Miller's memoir of escaping from the Jim Crow South. She shows herself in Aboriginal Australian paintings, which carry stories from the Dreamtime. The Muse of Exile sings an elegy as I visit my mother, who has always been the essence of home and comfort. Now she has dementia. She is in exile from herself.