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The Sparrow: Selected Poems of A.F. Moritz
by A.F. MoritzFeaturing internationally acclaimed poetry from more than twenty books and chapbooks published over forty-five years, The Sparrow is a career-spanning selection that reveals how A. F. Moritz’s dynamic, ever-exploratory work is also a vast, singular poem. A. F. Moritz has been called “one of the best poets of his generation” by John Hollander and “a true poet” by Harold Bloom, who ranks him alongside Anne Carson. He is the recipient of numerous awards and honours throughout North America, including the Award in Literature of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Guggenheim Fellowship, Poetry magazine’s Beth Hokin Prize, the Ingram Merrill Fellowship, and the Griffin Poetry Prize.The Sparrow: Selected Poems of A. F. Moritz surveys forty-five years of Moritz’s published poems, from earlier, lesser-known pieces to the widely acclaimed works of the last twenty years. Here are poems of mystery and imagination; of identification with the other; of compassion, judgement, and rage; of love and eroticism; of mature philosophical, sociological, and political analysis; of history and current events; of contemplation of nature; of exaltation and ennui, fullness and emptiness, and the pure succession and splendour of earthly nights and days.The Sparrow is more than a selected poems; it is also a single vast poem, in which the individual pieces can be read as facets of an ever-moving whole. This is the world of A. F. Moritz — a unique combination of lyrical fire and meditative depth, and an imaginative renewal of style and never-ending discovery of form.
Spawn
by Marie-Andrée GillSpawn is a braided collection of brief, untitled poems, a coming-of-age lyric set in the Mashteuiatsh Reserve on the shores of Lake Piekuakami (Saint-Jean) in Quebec. Undeniably political, Marie-Andrée Gill's poems ask: How can one reclaim a narrative that has been confiscated and distorted by colonizers?The poet's young avatar reaches new levels on Nintendo, stays up too late online, wakes to her period on class photo day, and carves her lovers' names into every surface imaginable. Encompassing twenty-first-century imperialism, coercive assimilation, and 90s-kid culture, the collection is threaded with the speaker's desires, her searching: for fresh water to "take the edge off," for a "habitable word," for sex. For her "true north"—her voice and her identity.Like the life cycle of the ouananiche that frames this collection, the speaker's journey is cyclical; immersed in teenage moments of confusion and life on the reserve, she retraces her scars to let in what light she can, and perhaps in the end discover what to "make of herself".
Spells for Clear Vision
by Neile GrahamShortlisted for the 1994 Pat Lowther Award "I believe in the common magic/ of forests and household godd" writes Neile Graham in "Spells for Clear Vision," the title poem of this volume. And it is a common magic which she works in this poetry of delicate attentions. Graham writes about trying to see clearly, about trying to articulate ways of living in a modern, often blinding world. Meditative, individual and ever-open to the intricate and shifting world around her, Graham's is a pensive and a thoughtful eye. Her poetry thinks through and with sight; it turns on a perceptiveness which is at once sensual and quietly, accessibly, intelletual. How Graham sees her world will alter how we see ours.
Spirit Engine
by John DonlanJohn Donlan’s lyric work seeks the connection between lives—not just the life of a coyote and the life of a man, or the peaceful cacophony of a pond in summer and the life of the human listener—but between the life before birth, and the life after. He reveals the wilderness to us moment by moment, while simultaneously driving us back into our own nature—a process readers, lifted by Donlan’s imagery, rhythms, and insights, can only experience as pure pleasure. Here beauty is the engine that enspirits the mind, freeing us from contemporary despair and the illusion we’ve left nature behind. Devil’s Paintbrush. In my slow-burning archive orange hawkweed thrives in granite-charactered soil spalled off the basement stone, a beaver labours up her steep skid road logging poplar for food and shelter, wind drives rivers of ripples down a pond. Everything here knows what to do. I investigate every valve, work and rework notes to husks, skeletal remains, survivors who revive experience. I try to memorize, to make some pictures to walk into, in the final time when I can’t walk or hear or see, and see lake-cradling pink granite, its orange earth, its skin of lives flickering, flickering.
Standing in the Flock of Connections
by Heather CadsbyBy turns funny, frank, mysterious, and heartbreaking, Standing in the Flock of Connections, Heather Cadsby’s fifth collection of poetry, is one hundred proof associative thought. These poems testify to the human mind’s capacity to “do”—taking into account all of the performative, causal, athletic, and sexual connotations of that verb. Many of them come in on an overheard conversation or monologue—mid-fight, mid-stride—and the absent details and specifics often function to open up a space for things to become other things, for the flock of connections to swarm.
Steam-Cleaning Love
by J. A. HamiltonJ.A. Hamilton distinguished herself with Body Rain (1991) a tough, passionate lyrical book written out of a woman's anger and a woman’s love. Steam-Cleaning Love, Hamilton’s second book of poetry, is "ginger root tough and jelly edgy" -- spicy, sweet, biting; it overwhelms, inundates, the palate. This new book revives the angry, biting, funny, loving, randy voice that won readers to her first volume, but sets that voice in a gentler space. These are passionate poems that celebrate women as friends and lovers, and the beauty, the delight, the desire of women's bodies.
Stilt Jack (A List)
by John ThompsonThe much-loved, yet undervalued, final book of poems by British-Canadian poet John Thompson, is reissued in a handsome edition, featuring a new introduction by Rob Winger.Originally published in 1978, Stilt Jack is a series of powerful soliloquies on the complexity of love and the process of living. These are made immediate through Thompson’s command of metaphor, his eye for the New Brunswick landscape, his intense, often elliptical way of transfiguring everyday things into shorthand symbols of reality. This remarkable sequence of poems is based on the ghazal, an ancient Persian poetic form which is discussed in Thompson’s introduction to the original edition of the book.These poems more than fulfill the promise of Thompson’s first collection, At the Edge of the Chopping There Are No Secrets. Stilt Jack is the last testament of a major poet at the pinnacle of his craft.
subUrban Legends
by Joan CrateJoan Crate's much-anticipated third book of poetry is equal parts revision and reverie, offering a mid-life view of childhood influences and expectations that is stirring, startling, and wise. Deliciously invoking the iconic figure of Snow White, subUrban Legends considers what lies beyond youth and the trite promises of "happily ever after," transporting readers to a land of complexity and nuance from which few cultural officiados report.
A Sudden Sky: Selected Poems
by Ulrikka Gernes Patrick FriesenA Sudden Sky is a book of northern poems with crystalline images and lines, fragile graceful poems that speak of fragments, of the moment between open and closed eyes, of the human need for embrace. These poems note the spaces between things -- always a gap, a failed connection, like radio waves caught in the sky. Gernes has called poetry "a resistance movement," explaining, "A poem gives us the possibility of hearing our own voices. While the media offer us the world in small pieces, which are experienced as chaos, poetry seeks connections."
Summer Grass
by Marianne BlugerWinner of the 1993 Archibald Lampman Award and shortlisted for the 1992 Pat Lowther Award Summer Grass follows Marianne Bluger's previous Brick books, On Nights Like This (1984) and Gathering Wild (1988). The two movements of Summer Grass, between them, comprehend the darknesses of "County Dire" and the depths of contentment in love and in home among the other (animate and inanimate) members of earth. Not literature, these poems are "uttered deeds." They probe "midnight gravities" with a light-suffused language born of faith.
The Sutler
by Michael KenyonIn language at once simple and eloquent, Michael Kenyon's The Sutler charts a falling and a rising, taking the reader through the grief of a failing relationship to the emergence of new possibility. Each poem is a gentleness deeply felt; each embued with a compassion, an honesty both stark and unflinching. Kenyon’s prose has shown him to be a consummate craftsman, and these poems are proof that he is a remarkable poet.
Tablature (Hugh MacLennan Poetry Series #31)
by Bruce WhitemanFrom the "rubble [that] is the order of the day" in the opening poem to the longing for a "radiant happy ending" in the book's final line, Tablature is a book of poems that traverses a great swath of the heart's experience in compelling and lucid poetic language. Bruce Whiteman's first book of poems in traditional lined form in thirty years is by turns learned and allusive, and emotionally expressive and despairing. These poems engage three large and powerful subjects: the landscapes we see and abide in, music that is comforting and a guide to hearing the poem's compulsions, and love - erotic, domestic, and enduring. Whiteman is keenly observant of the natural world of birds and trees, of rocks and water, alive to the pressures and hurts of daily life, and above all to the ways in which music rescues us from dependency and pulls us back from a "cultivated hysteria." If there is an "intimate / apocalypse," there is also "radiant hope." The poems in Tablature capture readers with their singular music and their bright and unblinking takes on the quotidian challenges of living a life. These are poems of a highly tuned sensibility matched by a sweetness of language.
Take the Compass (Hugh MacLennan Poetry Series #79)
by Maureen Hynestake the harp, take / the Fitbit and the Band-Aid box. Fold the whole / grey sheet of sky, lumpy and unalluring / into your rucksack.A strong theme of journeys is threaded through Take the Compass. In a sense, every poem is itself a journey – into the past or the present, or toward what we hope and fear for the future. Poems can be journeys of repair and recovery, adventure and discovery. However, even in pandemic times when our journeying is curtailed, or at least confined, when we are abiding in one physical location with chafing and restiveness, we are still travelling. One of those journeys is discovering where language can take us.Maureen Hynes’s poems travel through cities and their outskirts to rivers, forests, and graveyards. They travel in time into the troubled present, across decades into early childhood, and into our perilous collective futures, seeking guides for these explorations. The title poem addresses the search for tools and instruments that will “ward off adversity” – tools to help us move forward to our chosen destinations. Take the Compass calls on art and nature as invisible helpers, and on uncountable things – personal values and traits such as courage – to “break the bad news into nine living petals.”As with all her collections, Hynes shows a commitment to social justice, to acknowledging historical and contemporary inequities, to the search for sources of remedy, repair, and renewal, and to the sustaining power of love. The variety of poetic forms she has chosen lets this search carry the complexity and seriousness of its themes.
The Tantramar Re-Vision (Hugh MacLennan Poetry Series #62)
by Kevin IrieI've lived the way a field is sometimes / a shelter for mice / or sometimes a source of game / for a hawkInspired by the literary landscape of the late poet John Thompson, Kevin Irie's The Tantramar Re-Vision presents a portrait of nature where the benign and the bedevilled coexist, collude, or collide.The Tantramar Re-Vision charts routes of discovery as it follows trails, waterways, flights, and fears, be it through the woods, the wilds, the page, or the mind where "it's hard to admit / you are not to your taste." It questions an existence in which the inhuman thrives, ignorant of divinity, while the human psyche continues to search for answers as "life takes directions / away from" it. The Tantramar Marsh setting of John Thompson's Stilt Jack resonates with Irie's landscapes of birds, fish, plants, and wildlife, all still within reach yet part of a world where "wind carries sounds / it cannot hear."Insightful and meditative, The Tantramar Re-Vision is poetry of the inner self and the outside observer, a poetic testament to the ways literature creates its own landmarks and nature survives without knowing a word.
Technologies / Installations
by Kim MaltmanThis extraordinary sequence of prose and free verse poems explores the postures, styles, and rhetorics of our culture and its history -- not with the predictable aim of criticism and rejection, or the fashionable aim of recombinant word-play, but in the service of an unflinching, and thereby real, passion. This is humane vision of great breadth, depth, and particularity.
Tell
by Soraya PeerbayeA collection of poems partially based on the Reena Virk murder case. Virk was an Asian adolescent whose drowned body was found in the Gorge Waterway in a Victoria, BC suburb, in 1997. Some of the poems use found material from court transcripts. The murder made international headlines due to the viciousness employed by Virk's assailants: seven girls and one boy between the ages of 13 and 16, five of whom were white. The poems examine in part the poet's remembrances of girlhood, the unease of adolescence, and the circumstances that enable some to pass through adolescence unhurt.
Tell Them It Was Mozart
by Angeline SchellenbergLinked poems that uncover the ache and whimsy of raising children on the autism spectrum. Through public judgments, detouring dreams and unspoken prayers, Tell Them It Was Mozart, Angeline Schellenberg’s debut collection, traces both a slow bonding and the emergence of a defiant humour. This is a book that keens and cherishes, a work full of the earthiness and transcendence of mother-love. One of the pleasures of this collection is its playful range of forms: there are erasure poems, prose poems, lists, found poems, laments, odes, monologues and dialogues in the voices of the children, even an oulipo that deconstructs the DSM definition of autism. From a newborn "glossed and quivering" to a child conquering the fear of strange toilets, Tell Them It Was Mozart is bracing in its honesty, healing in its jubilance.
Ten Letters
by Colleen ThibaudeauA sequence of elegiac poems by the least recognized major poet in Canada, celebrating place all the way to glory.
That Light Feeling Under Your Feet (Crow Said Poetry)
by Kayla GeitzlerFinalist for The Fiddlehead Poetry Book Prize at the New Brunswick Book Awards!Shortlisted for the Robert Kroetsch Award for Poetry at the 2019 Alberta Book Publishing Awards!That Light Feeling Under Your Feet plunges headfirst into the surreal and slogging world of cruise ship workers. These masterfully crafted poems challenge perpetuating colonial and class relations, as well as the hedonistic lifestyle attributed to the employees of these floating resorts. Kayla Geitzler’s debut collection interprets isolation, alienation, racism, and assimilation into the margins as inevitable consequences for the seafaring workforce of the most profitable sector of the tourism industry.Exploring the liminal space between labour and leisure, the poems in That Light Feeling Under Your Feet are at once buoyant and weighty, with language that cuts like a keel through the sea.
the swailing (Hugh MacLennan Poetry Series)
by Patrick James ErringtonHere the long edge / of town Low / winter fog / … My breath / my offering We are / our bodies burning Firmly rooted in fire-haunted landscapes that are at once psychological, emotional, and fiercely real, Patrick Errington’s first collection traces the brittle boundaries between presence and absence, keeping and killing, cruelty and tenderness. In these poems human voices whisper through the natural world – a hand turns on a lamp to extinguish the stars; stones outline a sleeping form; a black eye is a storm cloud. Errington stokes vivid images, formal grace, and subtle humour into the flickers of life that hold fast against unforgiving terrain. Here language functions like a controlled burn, one that could at any moment preserve, perfect, or reduce to ash. Urgent, resonant to the bone, the swailing burns to the ember-edge of grief, memory, and control to find the wildness, wilderness, and wonder that remain.
Theophylline: A Poetic Migration via the Modernisms of Rukeyser, Bishop, Grimké (de Castro, Vallejo)
by Erín Moure Elisa SampedrínWhat is breath for? What is archive? Why write a poem, instead of... something else? Theophylline is a work of poetry motivated by asthma, seeking poetry’s futurity in a queer and female heritage. Moure crosses a border to engage the poetry of three American modernists—Muriel Rukeyser, Elizabeth Bishop, and Angelina Weld Grimké—as a translator might enter work to translate it. But what if that work is already in English? Moure listens to rhythms, punctuation, conditions of production and reception, and finds migration patterns, queeritude, mother mimory, wars, silence, constraints on breath, and social bias played out in terms of race and/or class. Moving from present to past to a future in the unwritten; querying borders, jarred by intrusions from alter ego Elisa Sampedrín, Theophylline finishes with poems informed by pandemic walks and human aging that include two translations: from Rosalía de Castro, pre-modernist poet who wrote in Galician calling on women to speak, and from César Vallejo, the twentieth century Peruvian whose poetics shattered the colonial (Spanish) tongue.
Thin Air of the Knowable
by Wendy DonawaAn elegiac and incisive debut that blends poems of social justice with poems of ordinary life. In her first collection, Thin Air of the Knowable, the physical landscapes of Wendy Donawa’s life—West Coast, Caribbean, prairies—ground many of her poems and often reflect the inner geography of her preoccupations. A road-trip poem moves from prairie winter, “an icy scatter of gravel / the moving centre of this unpeopled world,” past a cattle liner on its way to the slaughter house, but it also passes beneath the sky’s “blazing scroll of light,” and magpies “flashing black and teal in the sun.” Landscape also functions metaphorically to suggest how historical settings play out in the exigencies of individual lives. Other preoccupations include poems that reflect on poesis itself—the strange poem-making compulsion to capture that which is largely inexpressible (hence “the thin air of the knowable”), and the role of dreams, memory, and intuition in shaping a poem’s knowledge. Donawa is, in many ways, a political poet, yet manages to put flesh and blood into everything she writes. In the end, Perhaps there is only the demonic journey.Small beauties by the roadside, andsuch love as we can muster. (from “Pu Ru Paints Zhong Kui the Demon Queller on a Mule”) Praise for Thin Air of the Knowable: “Wendy Donawa’s poetry rests at the very edge of beauty where a wild delicacy resides.” —Patrick Lane “Like the watchmakers of old, Wendy Donawa puts a spyglass to her eye and fixes her vision to the minute, to all that carries on beneath our imperfect sight—worlds upon worlds brought into the sharpest focus.” —Pamela Porter
Thin Moon Psalm
by Sheri BenningWinner of the 2007 Anne Szumigalski Award for Poetry and the 2007 City of Saskatoon Prize and nominated for Book of the Year (Saskatchewan Book Awards) and longlisted for the 2008 ReLit Awards Fierce and delicate poems from a young poet reminiscent of Jane Hirshfield and Jan Zwicky Rapt, musical, passionately engaged, the poems in Thin Moon Psalm move towards their own inner stillness, while also bearing witness to the power of relatedness -- to family, lovers, and the prairie landscape itself. Many of them are poems of remembrance and deep grieving, recalling in etched details the rigours and joys of life on a prairie farm, and those iconic moments which are alive with the unspoken -- moments between father and daughter, mother and child, sister and sister, lover and lover, poet and friend. Especially they take on the burden of what is lost, knowing "There is always a room we will never return to" and "we return only through loss: the place where we began."
This Brighter Prison: A Book of Journeys
by Karen ConnellyIn her first book of poetry since The Small Words in My Body, which won the Pat Lowther Prize for 1990, Karen Connelly writes, in the tradition of the writer-adventurer, of vivid encounters and reflections abroad and at home, continuing her pursuit of "living knowledge of the world." These poems enact journeys of the body and heart with candour and sensuous grace, catching the very texture of human experience in the lithe, muscular lines which have a cat-like metaphorical reach.
This Is a Tiny Fragile Snake
by Nicholas RuddockFifteen poems explore close encounters with animals … and choosing to respond tenderly. Whether it’s helping a hummingbird escape, respecting a bear’s habitat, admiring a heron’s beauty, or giving way to ants at a picnic, the human response in these poems is to do no harm, and to help whenever possible. The poems follow a seasonal progression, ending with a final poem that imagines where each animal might be on a winter night. Inspired by personal experiences, Nicholas Ruddock’s poems are simply written, with a pleasing rhyme, and fun to read aloud. In the spirit of the text, Ashley Barron’s cut-paper collage illustrations portray each creature with respectful realism, in environments ranging from rural and wild to urban and suburban. A delightful dip into poetry for young animal lovers! Key Text Features illustrations poems Correlates to the Common Core State Standards in English Language Arts: CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.K.4 Ask and answer questions about unknown words in a text. CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.K.6 With prompting and support, name the author and illustrator of a story and define the role of each in telling the story. CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.1.4 Identify words and phrases in stories or poems that suggest feelings or appeal to the senses.