Cut Flowers (2009) For some time I had been drawn to the idea of a lone voice in a small sea of orchestral instruments. In 2008 I came across an old edition of the 44 sonnets by Elizabeth Barrett Browning called “Sonnets from the Portuguese”. For this piece, I extracted one sentence from each of the sonnets, creating a text of 44 lines. Taken together, these ‘cut flowers’ created a new poem – subtle, fragmentary, elusive – that became a kind of inner monologue. I think of this work as an interior monodrama exploring various shadings of thought and feeling; it is both a declaration of love to the beloved, and a dawning sense of commitment to the act of writing. This work was created with support from the Canada Council for the Arts.