Francis Scudellari's "East of the Sun" begins with a modest confession: the speaker keeps trying to draw a place where two people might meet. Words become pencil strokes, "hatching crumpled rocks / to top a barren line," and the sketch goes well until the trees come too alive. "I give these trees too much / life, too much choice," the speaker admits, and "missing you," they pull up their roots and bolt off the page. The rest of the poem follows that escape through a mirrored, mechanical, crowded world. Its central idea is that longing can't be satisfied by a carefully composed picture of the beloved. Only a shared, improvised act can get the speaker home.
The form acts out this escape. There is no end-rhyme and no regular line length, and the sentences refuse to stay inside their stanzas. "Escape / the page to run" ends one stanza and "down mirrored corridors" begins the next. "A past that trips its way" stumbles over the break into "across black-and-white tiles." "Then, a stray" is left hanging before "among banqueted queues." Each gap is a small spill over the edge, like the trees leaving the paper. The final line has no full stop, so the "shared breath's slow unwind" is still going when the text stops.
Where rhyme is missing, texture takes over. Consonants bunch together in phrases like "squat glowing bellies" and "salt-and-pepper pawns," which makes the reader slow down and handle the words as if they were objects. Colour does quieter work. "Vibrant green" appears in the first stanza and then never returns. The world that follows is "steely," "stainless," "black-and-white," "ivory," "cream," drained to metal and monochrome. The speaker's own drawing was the last place anything was alive.
The middle stanzas turn into a kind of dream-logic chess game. The floor is a board of "black-and-white tiles," the people are "mechanical players" over "carved pieces," and the crowds are "wooden." That last word may echo the runaway trees, though the poem never says so outright. A temptation is offered in the "stainless pods" with "leather laps," where the speaker could "nestle" and watch "digits whirl backward" to a "piped-in lilt." This is a lullaby for the past, a way of giving up on the present. The speaker declines. "Instead I dodge / as I skip-dance through," and the playful verb matters, because the speaker is stubborn but not grim. Grabbing the pawns and tossing them "shoulder-ward" recalls the habit of throwing salt over one's shoulder, which fits the "salt-and-pepper" phrase, though that is a reading rather than something the poem states. The games are "not fit / for the fancied fix I place on distant cracked / pedestal." The beloved has been idealised and set far away, and the speaker half-admits that the pedestal is damaged and the fixation a fantasy.
The last stanza resolves the opening with a pun. The speaker's "hard-bound tale of tender leaves" holds leaves as pages, but the word also recalls the foliage that fled the sketch. The trees have come back as a book. Then the beloved, pen poised, does something unexpected: the ink "once-written / you tear." The verb is violent, but the act is gentle, because the torn pages become "papyrus sail boats." Papyrus is among the oldest writing materials, so the whole history of writing seems to be folded into a toy. The written account of love is sacrificed so that it can move, "homeward pushed by a shared breath."
The poem's reasoning is that no description can hold a person, and that trying to fix someone on the page, or on a pedestal, leads only to runaway trees and cold, empty games. The title, "East of the Sun," points to a place that sits on no map, and the poem itself never mentions the sun. That suggests the title names the meeting place the speaker can't draw, which is a reading rather than something the text says. What makes the poem worth reading is how it ends. It doesn't conclude that art is useless. It lets the book be torn up and turned into something two people can launch together, and that gives art a new purpose: to be shared, not to preserve the beloved.