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Canadian poetry

  • Author:
    Holmes, Nancy
    Summary:

    "Arborophobia, the latest collection by award-winning poet Nancy Holmes, is a poetic spiritual reckoning. Its elegies, litanies, and indictments concern wonder, guilt, and grief about the journey of human life and the state of the natural world. When a child attempts suicide and western North America burns and the creep of mortality closes in, is spiritual and emotional solace possible or even desirable? Answers abound in measured, texturally intimate, and often surprising ways. The title sequence, named for a word that means ?hatred of trees,? sassily blurs the boundaries between human beings and Ponderosa pines, reminding us how fragile our conceptual frameworks really are. Another sequence responds to Julian of Norwich's writing and call ?to practise the art / of letting things happen.? Saints' lives interlace with our quotidian experience, smudging connections between the spiritual and the earthly. Taking a hard look at what we have done to this beautiful planet and to those we love, Arborophobia is a companion for all who grapple with the problem of hope in times of crisis."--

  • Author:
    Steadman, Dean
    Summary:

    Shortlisted for the 2017 Archibald Lampman Award and the Raymond Souster Award

    Poems that echo Satie’s haunting music and refract the ironies of the Parisian Dada movement

    A man who might be Erik Satie floats, à la Magritte, above Paris rooftops, thinking of a newly-extinct species of songbirds, “contemplating grief in the absence of song.” By turns tender, wry, playful and fierce, the poems in Dean Steadman’s second collection, Après Satie – For Two and Four Hands, use surreal imagery, recurring characters and cyclical themes to evoke the repetitive nature of much of Satie’s music, as well as the artistic and intellectual temperament of Paris during Satie’s most creative years.

    The prose poems in the collection borrow titles from Satie’s piano compositions, and all of the poems are annotated in a manner similar to Satie’s published scores, using a selection of his performance instructions (for example, “like a nightingale with a toothache”).

    From the affair of Satie and painter Suzanne Valadon to the glimpsed lives of a contortionist, a French cowboy, a Falling Man, and a Floating Woman in the Dada-inflected prose poems, to the musings in other poetic forms that draw us forward in time, to a present-day hospice, or back, to the gallop of a mounted huntress, Après Satie involves us in the ongoing muddle of pain, sorrow, compassion, passion, joy and curiousness that is our human condition.

    “When he died, Erik Satie left twelve grey suits hanging in his closet. With surreal virtuosity Dean Steadman has pulled eighty-four sinuous poems and prose riffs out of their velvet pockets.”—William Aide

    “Shifting geography and perspective as easily as form, [these] poems beguile the senses as deftly as a menagerie of circus contortionists.” —Sandra Ridley

  • Author:
    Porter, Michelle
    Summary:

    In Approaching Fire, Michelle Porter embarks on a quest to find her great-grandfather, the Métis fiddler and performer Léon Robert Goulet. Through musicology, jigs and reels, poetry, photographs, and the ecology of fire, Porter invests biography with the power of reflective ingenuity, creating a portrait which expands beyond documentation into a private realm where truth meets metaphor. Weaving through multiple genres and traditions, Approaching Fire fashions a textual documentary of rescue and insight, and a glowing contemplation of the ways in which loss can generate unbridled renewal.

  • Author:
    Grant, Shauntay, Thiébaux-Heikalo, Tamara
    Summary:

    From patchwork-quilt farmland to the winding red roads, from sandy beaches to the endless stars at night, Apples and Butterflies shows Prince Edward Island shining in the bright blue and gold light of fall. Shauntay Grant's award-winning poetry and Tamara Thiébaux Heikalo's rich and wild illustrations pull the reader towards the wide-open space of the island. New softcover edition.

  • Author:
    Gansworth, Eric
    Summary:

    How about a book that makes you barge into your boss's office to read a page of poetry from? That you dream of? That every movie, song, book, moment that follows continues to evoke in some way? The term Apple is a slur in Native communities across the country. It's for someone supposedly red on the outside, white on the inside. Eric Gansworth is telling his story in Apple (Skin to the Core). The story of his family, of Onondaga among Tuscaroras, of Native folks everywhere. From the horrible legacy of the government boarding schools, to a boy watching his siblings leave and return and leave again, to a young man fighting to be an artist who balances multiple worlds. Eric shatters that slur and reclaims it in verse and prose and imagery that truly lives up to the word heartbreaking.

  • Author:
    Anderson, Mia
    Summary:

    Verve, energy, wit, piquance and pure linguistic excitement: Mia Anderson's poetry is a whole cookbook of poetic experiences. Anderson is always ready to take big risks, and her work shows her love of life in its manyness and accident, as well as a delight in the intricate prism of language.

    Appetite includes the long poem sequence "The Saugeen Sonata" which won The Malahat Review's Long Poem Prize in 1988.

  • Author:
    Blodgett, E. D.
    Summary:

    Nothing Is But You and I, the breathtaking new volume in the Apostrophes series, reveals poet E.D. Blodgett at his most accomplished. A masterful lyrical grace meets exquisite technique as Blodgett fathoms intimacy, knowledge, and being. The poems allow us to listen to one side of an intimate conversation between I and Thou; yet despite this inward focus, the speaker looks up and out at a larger world, inviting us into contemplations of loss, time, memory, and the ineffable other. These majestic poems reward deep reading and deliberation. Reflecting the heights of one of the most distinguished poetry careers in Canada, this volume is a must-have for anyone who loves or studies Canadian literature or poetry.

  • Author:
    Blodgett, E. D
    Summary:

    Nothing Is But You and I, the breathtaking new volume in the Apostrophes series, reveals poet E.D. Blodgett at his most accomplished. A masterful lyrical grace meets exquisite technique as Blodgett fathoms intimacy, knowledge, and being. The poems allow us to listen to one side of an intimate conversation between I and Thou; yet despite this inward focus, the speaker looks up and out at a larger world, inviting us into contemplations of loss, time, memory, and the ineffable other. These majestic poems reward deep reading and deliberation. Reflecting the heights of one of the most distinguished poetry careers in Canada, this volume is a must-have for anyone who loves or studies Canadian literature or poetry.

  • Author:
    Kennedy, Bill , Wershler-Henry, Darren
    Summary:

    you are entirely happy with your poem / you are not happy then there is no charge and your deposit is returned / you are totally satisfied with the outcome / you are a man / you are a little confused / you are entirely happy with your poem / you are not happy then there is no charge and your deposit is returned / you are totally satisfied with the outcome . . . 'Apostrophe' is: a) a figure of speech in which a person, an abstract quality or a nonexistent entity is addressed as though present, b) a poem written in 1993 in which every sentence is an apostrophe, c) a program--apostropheengine.ca--based on the 1993 poem that hijacks search engines in order to extend the poem infinitely, d) a book of poetry written using the website. The answer: e) all of the above. Bill Kennedy and Darren Wershler-Henry's Apostrophe contains all of these things, except the search engine (but you can visit that any time you like). Each line from the original poem has become the title of a new poem generated by the program's metonymic romp through the World Wide Web. Phrases rub against each other promiscuously; poems and readers alike come to their own conclusions. The results are by turns poignant, banal, offensive and hilarious, but always surprising and always unaffected. In other words, everything a book of contemporary poetry should be, and then some. Poet and scholar Charles Bernstein has suggested that Apostrophe may be related to Freud's notion of the uncanny, a somnambulistic drift that appears aimless yet somehow always returns to 'you.' Apostrophe is an entirely new kind of poetry: neither stable nor unstable, sections come and go, but the overall shape of the poem remains vaguely familiar, like a trick of memory.

  • Author:
    Funk, Carla
    Summary:

    Capturing moments in time and nature, Carla Funk’s poems bring the world to a momentary standstill. Funk translates vivid descriptions and feeling into her poems, both testing and playing with traditional poetic experiences.Apologetic’s poems experiment with expressing thoughts and emotions in formal poetic traditions, confining words to metrical lines or rhyme schemes. Many deal with the natural world, moments in time spent outdoors, in gardens, and capturing fleeting impressions in the human experience. Playing with form and content, Funk evokes the idea of a flesh-and-bones body (the poetic structure) carrying a spiritual entity (the poem’s meaning).“Highway 16 Sonnet” uses the traditional sonnet form to capture a gruesome snapshot of roadkill as a harsh reality of travel on a Canadian highway. “Ring Around the Moon” describes in five verses of four lines each, the experience of taking out the garbage late at night and observing the beautiful night sky, something hallowed above the stench of waste.

  • Author:
    Scarsbrook, Richard
    Summary:

    Welcome to the apocalypse! It was arrived . . . not with a bang, but with the white noise hum of tabloid news and the empty promise of the internet. Richard Scarsbrook`s Apocalypse One Hundred strips back the veneer of our screen-filled lives to expose every nip and tuck of our digital fantasies. Each hundred-word poem peeks over the event horizon to see the distraction that binds us to this world, hemming in thought and imagination. To learn more . . . just click here!

  • Author:
    Soutar-Hynes, Mary Lou
    Summary:

    The poems in Any Waking Morning probe deeply into love, loss, and life's darker dilemmas. They seek pathways and meaning, interrogate endings and life changes, and tap the creative energy engendered through art's ekphrastic cycles. While foregrounding the influence of contemporary ideas on the author's poetic explorations, the collection returns inevitably to images, insights and experiences from the Caribbean and the author's early life. Unfolding in four sections: "The Way Light Falls," "Unmasked," "Beyond Convergence," and "Fragments and Heartwood," Soutar-Hynes' images are vividly pictorial.

  • Author:
    Humphreys, Helen
    Summary:

    Winner of the 2000 Canadian Authors Association Award for Poetry and shortlisted for the 2000 Pat Lowther Award and the 2001 Milton Acorn Memorial People’s Poetry Prize

    Physical and fiercely lyric, Helen Humphreys' Anthem is a litany of want. A song of poverty and of desire, of the reach forward and the relentless backward glance. With stark images and subtle, tensile strength, her poems touch that rare interval between presence and absence, echo and answer, between wall and window and sky -- that gap in which we live, the space words make.

  • Author:
    Sharpe, Jamie
    Summary:

    An accessible and illuminating debut collection that explores the arranged marriage of the bestial and humane

    Logic is strained, existence contracts and multiplies, connections amputate then graft in incongruous ways in Jamie Sharpe’s poems, which, like a funhouse mirror, reflect our own absurd image.

    Nancy Reagan promotes crab salad (which is to say, her husband); the city of Paris spills into the countryside; a hammer seeks understanding through a vase. An assemblage of often disparate elements, Animal Husbandry Today attempts the ultimate reconciliation: that of the mind with the world.

     

    A plane crashes on the border of two countries.
    Can you wear white to the funeral
    If you’re a virgin before mayday?
    — from “Two Trains”

  • Author:
    Charlton, Brian
    Summary:

    A pinball wizard stars in this urban romance, set where the blues meet jazz in London, Ontario's historic York Hotel.

  • Author:
    Helwig, Susan L.
    Summary:

    A love-you-love-you-not daisy petal game for the 21st century, And the Cat Says… is a whimsical, delectable treat; a poetry collection which weaves in some strange haircuts, flying carpets and two sets of twins. Oh, and did we mention the horses?

  • Author:
    Wallin, Myna
    Summary:

    Bringing together the themes of death, of gender and sexuality, the poet creates a speaker whose language and experience, linked from poem to poem, reflects the true complexity of a woman's perspective. Death is a prevalent theme; anxiety, fear and paranoia simmer throughout the poems. Regret, too, is a recurrent theme, as previous experience defines us even by its absence. The societal construct of womanhood, questions of aging, and female stereotypes are opportunities for an analysis of women's roles and the speaker's need to subvert modern ideals of femininity and sexuality. The poems often employ satire or self-parody and wry humour to suggest that a woman's understanding of her options in the twenty-first century, in light of the many waves of feminism, is always in flux and always challenging.

  • Author:
    Dickinson, Adam
    Summary:

    The poems of Anatomic have emerged from biomonitoring and microbiome testing on the author's body to examine the way the outside writes the inside, whether we like it or not. Adam Dickinson drew blood, collected urine, swabbed bacteria, and tested his feces to measure the precise chemical and microbial diversity of his body. To his horror, he discovered that our "petroculture" has infiltrated our very bodies with pesticides, flame retardants, and other substances. He discovered shifting communities of microbes that reflect his dependence on the sugar, salt, and fat of the Western diet, and he discovered how we rely on nonhuman organisms to make us human, to regulate our moods and personalities. Structured like the hormones some of these synthetic chemicals mimic in our bodies, this sequence of poems links the author's biographical details (diet, lifestyle, geography) with historical details (spills, poisonings, military applications) to show how permeable our bodies are to the environment. As Dickinson becomes obsessed with limiting the rampant contamination of his own biochemistry, he turns this chemical-microbial autobiography into an anxious plea for us to consider what we're doing to our world -- and to our own bodies.

  • Author:
    Vautour, Katie
    Summary:

    Katie Vatour’s extraordinary debut collection is an eclectic examination of the space where humans and animals meet, where migratory patterns encounter commercial flights, and birds appear as fishermen, security guards, and street performers. There are riffs on the chameleon and lyrebird, odes to buffalo and shark. With poems that are at once intuitive yet idiosyncratic, visceral yet cerebral, and that flourish an unconventional sense of effortless motion, An Unorthodox Guide to Wildlife considers how animals exist in our lives and imaginations: as autonomous beings, as mimics and metaphors of our own lives, and as bellwethers of environmental damage. At times humourous, tragic, or both, these poems tell the story of natural existence in a sometimes unnatural world.

  • Author:
    Pittman, Al
    Summary:

    This compilation from one of Canada's most acclaimed writers spans four decades and six volumes. Often bittersweet and occasionally enigmatic, these poems represent Pittman's infinite talent. Targeted at a wide circle of readers, this book gives poetry back to the people, where it truly belongs.

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