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Canadian poetry

  • Auteur:
    Ball, Jonathan
    Sommaire:

    Winner of the 2013 Aqua Books Lansdowne Prize for Poetry (Manitoba Book Awards) If David Lynch crashed into Franz Kafka in a dark alley, the result might look like The Politics of Knives. Moving from shattered surrealism to disembowelled films, these poems land us in a limbo between the intellectual and the visceral, between speaking and screaming. Finding the language of violence and the violence in language, Jonathan Ball becomes the Stephen King of verse.

  • Auteur:
    Humphreys, Helen
    Sommaire:

    In her third book of poetry The Perils of Geography, Helen Humphreys charts a world that opens under the prodding and promise of language. With the wit and eye for evocative detail which gained readers for both Gods and Other Mortals and Nuns Looking Anxious, Listening to Radios, Humphreys probes the immediacy of now, the intensity of this, the residue of then. Don’t be deceived by the spare appearance; her poems are resonant and full, "all angles and confidence." Light falls slant across them. She maps "what surrounds not what's made still" -- "the moving line." The line she traces connects the pull of memory and moment, open roads and winter aconite, transcendental basements and ornamental shrubbery. In "Singing to the Bees," the ten poem sequence which makes up the second of three sections in Perils, she slips inside folk wisdoms, wears them with an easy grace, all flesh and wit and possibility: dancing shoes, gifted pigs, swarming bees, airplane nuns and spectre ships. These poems make superstition delicious.

  • Auteur:
    Dumont, Marilyn
    Sommaire:

    With a title derived from John A. Macdonald's moniker for the Métis, The Pemmican Eaters explores Marilyn Dumont's sense of history as the dynamic present. Combining free verse and metered poems, her latest collection aims to recreate a palpable sense of the Riel Resistance period and evoke the geographical, linguistic/cultural, and political situation of Batoche during this time through the eyes of those who experienced the battles, as well as through the eyes of Gabriel and Madeleine Dumont and Louis Riel. Included in this collection are poems about the bison, seed beadwork, and the Red River Cart, and some poems employ elements of the Michif language, which, along with French and Cree, was spoken by Dumont's ancestors. In Dumont's The Pemmican Eaters, a multiplicity of identities is a strengthening rather than a weakening or diluting force in culture.

  • Auteur:
    Dumont, Marilyn
    Sommaire:

    A picture of the Riel Resistance from one of Canada’s preeminent Métis poets

    With a title derived from John A. Macdonald’s moniker for the Métis, The Pemmican Eaters explores Marilyn Dumont’s sense of history as the dynamic present. Combining free verse and metered poems, her latest collection aims to recreate a palpable sense of the Riel Resistance period and evoke the geographical, linguistic/cultural, and political situation of Batoche during this time through the eyes of those who experienced the battles, as well as through the eyes of Gabriel and Madeleine Dumont and Louis Riel.

    Included in this collection are poems about the bison, seed beadwork, and the Red River Cart, and some poems employ elements of the Michif language, which, along with French and Cree, was spoken by Dumont’s ancestors. In Dumont’s The Pemmican Eaters, a multiplicity of identities is a strengthening rather than a weakening or diluting force in culture.

  • Auteur:
    Greenwood, Catherine
    Sommaire:

    Notable Book in the 2005 Kiriyama Prize and longlisted for the 2005 ReLit Awards

    Catherine Greenwood draws on the stories and legends which surround the development of cultured pearls by Mikimoto, the fabulous Pearl King, to engage a rich array of themes, including the clash between an aesthetics of refinement and nuance, and mass manufacture. With discerning wit and a large range of styles and voices, she holds up each subject for contemplation as though it were a pearl, and explores the sometimes bizarre consequences of an overwhelming rage for beauty.

    As the seal is strong and breathes air,
    As the fish is quick and breathes water,
    So make me, a mermaid strong and quick.

    Bless me with abalone abundant as mushrooms,
    Oysters dropping ripe as plums into my palm.
    Let my births keep me ashore a few days only,
    Only for a little while let labour make me rest.

    from “The Diving Girls’ Prayer”

    When, in other sections of the book, Catherine Greenwood turns her attention to such matters as the still birth of a calf, teeth, moles, or the Shetland Island stone, she does so with the same care for the exact fit of style, the same sharply-angled craft.

    “The ancient Taoists believed that a pearl was grounded at the soul’s centre, that it took wisdom and clarity to create its essence. Catherine Greenwood’s first collection of poems is proof of that. Here is a new pearl, the beginning of a strand I hope, that will continue to be added to with such depth of field and luminosity.” – Don Domanski

  • Auteur:
    De Meijer, Sadiqa
    Sommaire:

    The Outer Wards, Sadiqa de Meijer's new collection, explores questions of maternal love and duty--and the powerlessness that comes with the disruption of that role through illness. "I was awake. / The hour was wrong," de Meijer writes, and her poems track, in visceral and tender detail, the distraction, exhaustion, exhilaration, and fear of child-rearing through crisis. For de Meijer, the experience was also a crisis of language, and the struggle to find new terms for her state. Addressed, in part, to a child she calls "my grievous spectacle, / my dearest unpossessable," The Outer Wards is everywhere marked by a joy in words--their quick-fire turns, sumptuous sounds, and nursery-rhyme seductions.

  • Auteur:
    Giovannone, Aaron
    Sommaire:

    Compulsively confessional and cracking-wise, The Nonnets is an utterly unique alchemy of poetry and comedy. Aaron Giovanonne's latest collection is a book-length sequence of 'nonnets'-nine-line poems that Giovannone handles with ruthless dexterity. Capturing transformations from first dates to goodbye texts, from mama's boy to unrepentant shoplifter, from post-industrial downtown to eleventh-century Italian monastery, these poems present a kaleidoscopic world that careens wildly between despair and ecstasy.

  • Auteur:
    Hoefle, Harold
    Sommaire:

    A whistling through teeth. / He shuts his eyes but still sees / the red glow of exit signs. Harold Hoefle's The Night Chorus rises out of forests and country roads, bars and buses, cities and small towns. These locales are the haunts of outsiders ranging from travellers and farmers to a soldier, a drug addict, a refugee, and the murdered. The past clings in these stark, evocative poems, "memory a closet of clothes / that hang from bent wire." In the tradition of songwriters like Gordon Lightfoot and Gord Downie and poets such as Al Purdy, Karen Solie, and David O'Meara, The Night Chorus presents so-called "obscure" lives, where dark and playful humour collides with historic and mythic characters including Ovid and Dante, Odysseus and Desdemona. Using lyric poetry and the ghazal, the prose poem and the elegy, The Night Chorus brims with images as sharp as wild geese scrawling letters against an evening sky and as humble as "pots of plum dumplings and still-warm soup." Bookended by a sequence of lyrics inspired by cross-country road trips, Hoefle references iconic places like Black Dog Road and Seldom Seen and peoples the landscape with imagined characters. Their voices - damaged, rough, intimate - will echo in the reader's mind.

  • Auteur:
    Cooley, Dennis
    Sommaire:

    The Muse Sings and the poet sings songs of love and longing from states of joy, self-doubt, vexation, curiosity, affection, observation, mock-indignation… The poems speak for themselves and sometimes “they talk all at once.” In seductive acts of language itself, they invoke and embrace the Muses as much as they do the writers who would become muses, from ancient Homer and Shakespeare to poets of contemporary time. These poems are the seasoned work of a trickster poet in his prime with a crow’s eye trained on the world. No silent words on the page, these: they are alert, thoughtful, at turns cheeky and saucy. The poems all but produce decibels despite the inked imprint on the page that would fix them silent in place, until a living voice sets them free.

  • Auteur:
    Janess, Danielle
    Sommaire:

    "A vibrating journey across time and the borders of memory and space to voice what was unvoiced, to restore the pieces of a broken world." Tomasz Rózycki, author of Colonies.

  • Auteur:
    Boxer, Asa
    Sommaire:

    An old idea of reality animates the poems in The Mechanical Bird: things are never what they seem. Opening with a quick-talking disquisition on lying (Keep it simple, tidy, / take a noncommittal stance) and ending with masterly mediation on the workshop and its drawing-board dreams, Asa Boxers debut constantly tests the claims of authenticity over artifice. Objects, settings and everyday details are swept up in an imagination that can never quite shake the sense of the visible worldeven nature itselfas an artful mixture of fact and invention. As suggested by the eponymous metal songster, these poems are exquisitely crafted, infused with a sense of kinetic spell-making, and sing with an exuberant trust in their own guile.

  • Auteur:
    Thibaudeau, Colleen
    Sommaire:

    Readers of Colleen Thibaudeau's selected poems, My Granddaughters Are Combing Out Their Long Hair, will feel at home in The Martha Landscapes, where domestic dearness and the exotic, like strangers, "make their first acquaintance….. in a blur of words." The cross-relationships that occur, in a poetry of technical virtuosity that feels as easy as breathing, are sensed to be permanent.

  • Auteur:
    Hunt, Ken
    Sommaire:

    The hands of humans split the atom and reshaped the world. Gradually revealing a sublime nightmare that begins with spontaneous nuclear fission in the protozoic and ends with the omnicide of the human race, The Manhattan Project traces the military, cultural, and scientific history of the development of nuclear weapons and nuclear power through searing lyric, procedural, and visual poetry. Ken Hunt's poetry considers contemporary life--life in the nuclear age--broadly and deeply. It dances through the liminal zones between routine and disaster, between life and death, between creation and destruction. From the mundane to the extraordinary, Hunt's poems expose the depth to which the nuclear has impacted every aspect of the everyday, and question humanity's ability to avoid our destruction. Challenging the complicity of the scientists who created devastating weapons, exploring the espionage of the nuclear arms race, and exposing the role of human error in nuclear disaster, The Manhattan Project is a necropastoral exploration of the literal and figurative fallout of the nuclear age. These poems wail like a meltdown siren, condemning anthropocentric thinking for its self-destructive arrogance.

  • Auteur:
    Acquelin, José, D'Alfonso, Antonio
    Sommaire:

    This selection of poems offers the reader a good introduction to a poet of oxymorons, the poet who brings light out of the darkness. Born and living in Montreal, José Acquelin is known to be a poet open wide to the world. He is the author of fifteen poetry collections and, for over twenty-five years, has been an active reader-performer-organizer of events mixing poetry, music and the visual arts, across the country as well as in Europe and Latin America.

  • Auteur:
    Reid, Monty
    Sommaire:

    Shortlisted for the 2009 Lampman-Scott Award (for the best book of poetry in the National Capital Region)

    A book of lyrics, fragmented, extended, and recovered, which read as a single long poem.

    The Luskville Reductions records a year in the life of a small Quebec town and the marriage that disintegrates there. While a book about loss, it is also a book about the state of becoming that coexists with change, the imbalance that for a time makes everything lucid, all the details adding up to much more than only an “us.” The visible goes beyond mere facts in these poems, transformed into the deeply seen – and therefore sacred.

    The problem with daylilies
    is the usual contemporary twaddle: how is it
    we know anything
    now that you’re gone.

    What do you mean
    now that you’re gone?

    What do you mean
    daylilies?

    “Marry the passionate grief of By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept with the pared-down utterances of Beckett’s lost men and you might arrive at The Luskville Reductions. While it evokes the dark cry of the lover in ‘O Western Wind,’ this long poem is entirely contemporary in its ontological alertness, its wry ironies. At once threnody and enactment of loss, it brings something utterly new into the corpus of Canadian poetry. It is a brilliantly achieved poem.” — Mary Dalton

  • Auteur:
    Greenwood, Catherine
    Sommaire:

    Nominated for the 2014 Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize (BC Book Prizes); finalist for the 2014 City of Victoria Butler Book Prize

    Atmospherically light and stylistically expansive – poems that regard our givens as a gift.

    Don McKay’s description of The Pearl King and Other Poems, Catherine Greenwood’s wonderful first book, also apply to The Lost Letters: “With discerning wit and a large range of styles and voices, she holds up each subject for contemplation as though it were a pearl. . . .”

    At the centre of The Lost Letters is a sequence of radically diverse poems based on the story of Heloise and Abelard, truly lovers in a dangerous time, the twelfth century. The raw material is heavy, tension between flesh and spirit being the serious issue carried forward from the twelfth century into the twenty-first. But Greenwood’s deft and delicate handling of scenarios of love requited but balked becomes a perceptive reading – extraordinarily inventive and constantly surprising – of contemporary secular society.

    The Lost Letters creates a world of wonder tinged with sadness on behalf of so much that goes unnoticed, whether it’s a bin of severed sows’ ears, a lizard tethered by its tail who severs it by self-amputation, or a down-and-out old schoolmate.

  • Auteur:
    Ferguson, Joel Robert
    Sommaire:

    Joel Robert Ferguson grew up in a family of working-class evangelical Baptists in the Maritimes and found an escape from that parochial world in literature. In his twenties, that escape became literal, as he hitchhiked across the country, working odd jobs. These experiences are reflected in his first poetry collection The Lost Cafeteria. The idea of place and transience forms the core around which the poems in this collection orbit. Stylistically, the poems vary, but often strive for a synthesis between experimental and traditional. Ferguson’s sonically dense political poems and elegies confront the ways in which working-class masculinity is used by capitalism and white supremacism.

  • Auteur:
    Zwicky, Jan
    Sommaire:

    "The Long Walk carries a lifetime's force of meaning. A deeply beautiful book." Anne Michaels In The Long Walk, Jan Zwicky bears witness to environmental and cultural cataclysm. Both prophetic and acutely personal, these poems extend her previous meditations on colonial barbarism and ecocide, on spiritual catastrophe and transformation. The voice now penetrates the steepest darknesses; it possesses extraordinary reach and density. Zwicky is one of North America's finest poets, and in this book she gives us her most profound work to date.

  • Auteur:
    Henderson, Mathew
    Sommaire:

    The lease is meaningless: a square paced first by seismic workers, and then your father, and then by every other man you know. Distilled from his time in the Saskatchewan and Albertan oilfields, Mathew Henderson’s The Lease plumbs the prairie depths to find human technology and physical labour realigning our landscape. With acute discipline, Henderson illuminates the stubborn and often unflattering realities of industrial culture and its cast of hard-living men. Shortlisted for the Trillium Book Award for Poetry (2013) Shortlisted for the Gerald Lampert Award

  • Auteur:
    Kenyon, Michael
    Sommaire:

    Shortlisted for the 2010 ReLit Award

    Poems of disturbing beauty, examining personal and collective loss.

    This is Michael Kenyon’s third full-length collection of poems. His poetry and fiction have always been alert to the underside, the angularity of the outcast, those forced by temperament or predilection or circumstance to the fringes of middle class life. Here, it is insight itself that pushes the speakers closer to the edge. The world of these poems is dark: Kenyon names and owns our clear cuts, our overpopulation, our fossil-fueled rush to oblivion, the violence embedded in sexuality. This is a book of expanded elegy, clear-eyed, unflinching amid the wreckage of its loves.

                   …It is useless to
    choose a direction: current must find us.

    At last we swim away from each other
    to make the storm less jealous, old stars freeze
    the water, earthquakes calve an island, and
    another me adores another you
    inland.

    – from “The Stars”

    Fiercely elegiac, jaggedly sexual, The Last House stands on the brink of devastation-personal, ancestral, cultural. There is transcendence here, but no redemption: it is too late. But this is also a book about love-protean, violent, perduring-love as the key to reality, even as it mystifies us or tears us apart. These are poems of deep and disturbing vision, sustained by electrifying honesty.

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