the poets have always preceded
installation shot, 2019

Travis O'Brian is an Anglican Priest, and rector of St. Barnabas Church in Victoria. He has a doctorate in philosophy from the Katholiek Universiteit, Leuven in Belgium, and wrote his dissertation on the work of Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard. For the past few years, Travis was Director of Anglican Studies at the Vancouver School of Theology, and is currently a Fellow at the Center for the Study of Religion and Society at the University of Victoria. One of his primary interests, which shapes both his academic writing and his poetry, is to engage what he understands to be the spiritual crisis of our modern, secular age. His long poem “Raven with Robin's Egg,” is an attempt to do so on a number of different levels: the emptying of language, fear of the unknowable and the technological society's 'elimination of chance,' the breakdown of relationships, the confusion and uncertainty around the question, 'in what can we put our hope?'