Madoc: A Mystery

"Madoc" is a long poetic sequence, also with a narrative element. It is based on the imagined establishing of a utopian pantisocratic community in the New World by the Romantic poets Coleridge and Southey. Each poem in the sequence has, as its a title, the name of a Western philosopher or scholar in brackets. The sequence is thus a critique and commentary of the imperial project in North America, and the role of the Western philosophical tradition as a foundation for colonialism. It also has a science fiction element in the passage that also refers to machine vision: the main character South (referring to Southey) is caught breaking into a futuristic corporation called Unitel, and is harnessed to a "retinagraph" - the narrative that follows is then scanned from the back of his retina (thus reversing the gaze of the coloniser).