Walter Ruhlmann

Crossing Puddles Walter Ruhlmann

The poems which compose this collection are what I call poetry of landscapes, or geographical poems. Yet, as you well know, geography can also be mapping the mind, the life, the existence-s of anyone around. This is where the feelings triggered by these territories led the poet: the observation of the self. I was born in Normandy, France and have been travelling a lot and living in foreign countries and remote places: Bath, Manchester, the Indian Ocean. I settled in centre eastern France in June 2012, and I realised there had been a cycle in this long journey, that I had run away from a place (Normandy) because I found it an excruciating place to live in and felt as if suffocating, it had become my fetters; just to find myself in the same kind of place, twenty-years later, and in a role I quite despised at the time. What other way is there, then, than to travel and map the self, just to escape differently and farther, even if that means losing one's mind?