In Dionne Brand's poem Inventory screens in two ways: first, to represent a disconnect between the individual and nature,

and secondly a disconnect between the individual and the community. Both of these forms of disconnection can either produce empathy or apathy in the individual. This is why the narrator is characterized as caring/empathetic while she characterizes others as being apathetic or malicious. The narrator's empathy comes from an acknowledgement of the horrors of the modern world and the recognition that life is mediated by technology (ie. filtered through screens in a way which separates humans from one another and from an idealized notion of nature). Although these are bleak affirmations they take on something of the positive for being just that: affirmations rather than negations. By representing an incommensurable disconnect between human/human and human/nature with the imagery of screens etc., in Inventory Dionne Brand helps to articulate some of the essential problems of the modern world in a way which is meant to inspire empathy.

From the beginning of the poem the narrator speaks of the way that screens can delude one into apathy/ignorance. In the opening lines she says, "We believed in nothing/ the black-and-white american movies/ buried themselves in our chests,/ glacial, liquid, acidic as love" (1). This is a way of saying that American movies, specifically Westerns, had the effect on her and others like her of making them believe in nothing, of making them internally apathetic without realizing it. This kind of apathy is brought about throughout the poem through all kinds of technologies with screens. Much later she writes, "The men here are plasma,/ they collapse into video games, Palm Pilots,/ remedies against dreams...they declare themselves innocent of all events..." (73). Here, technology is characterized very much as a dehumanizing force, submerging people to a point of mindless complacence and casual apathy. The narrator also spends most of her time gazing at the world through screens. However this does not have the effect of giving her over to apathy but rather sharpens her empathy. The third part of the poem is mostly a body count with details of where and when these people died. The numbers and causes of death add up at such an alarming rate that it becomes almost incomprehensible. This leaves us overwhelmed by a sense of evil in the world, a sense not easy to shake. But, contrary to the way she would internalize the morals of old american movies, or to the way that the plasma men "collapse" into their screens, the narrator/main character's method is to remain attentive, hence: "She has to keep watch at the window of the television, she hears what is never shown, the details are triumphant, she'll never be able to write them in time... there's another life, she listens, each hour, each night, behind the flat screen and the news anchor..." (28-29).

In this description of the main character watching television we get a sense of the television screen not telling the whole story, this is why she hears what is never shown and why theres another lifebehind the flat screen and the news anchor. This is to say that, due to her empathy and attentiveness, this figure is better able to realistically face the modern world then those who delude themselves and hide from it. This attentiveness is filtered through the poetic sensibility of the narrator, thus she writes, At least someone should sty awake, she thinks,/ someone should dream them along the abysmal roads (26). To an extent this is exactly what Brand is doing in this poem: bringing the reader along through poetically rendered dream/nightmare/all-too-real world. And so this poetic sensibility is contrasted with the technological and industrialized modern world in a way which shows how problematic the position of poetry is in such a world. Hence we get lines like, now she wishes she could hear/ all that noise that poets make about/ time and timelessness (33), forget it, we cant speak of nature in that breath anymore,/ the earth is corroding already with cities (40) and, Let us not invoke the natural world, its ravaged like any battlefield (42). This all shows that what poetry is traditionally thought of as: a reflection on nature, human virtue and beauty is not possible in our modern world due to the sheer amount of horror brought on and re-presented through technology. Brand seems to suggest that for poetry to exist in contemporary culture it cant delude itself into idealism or naturalism but rather must take account of the real horrors of the modern world. This is the position of the poetically empathetic in contrast to the culturally apathetic. Both apathy and empathy are shown in the poem as responses to the terror of the modern world, the former as a symptom of it the latter as a resistance to it. The way in which Brand articulates the problem of the relationship between technology, apathy/empathy, and poetry, affirms one of the biggest problems of the second millennium. But the way she deals with this problem through poetry suggests not a way out, but rather a way of facing the modern world and is thus positive in its own way.