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Canadian poetry

  • Author:
    eckhoff, keven mcpherson
    Summary:

    Would it be possible to compose a book that appears to be "about" its author, but is indirectly about something else, like identity or relationships or language? Maybe a book not written by a hero... but by many?This was the challenge taken up by Kevin McPherson Eckhoff in his fourth book, their biography: an organism of relationships. This collaborative memoir collages together word-portraits from friends, family, coworkers, strangers, robots, and even adversaries in order to create a silhouette of not a single person, but of the manacles that connect people to one another.their biography is meant to make people think—it's broad array of voices and poetic/prosaic forms disturbs comfortable patterns of reading, and its subject is as much about the contributors as the author. Eclectic and desolate, confessional and dubious, this record of relationships defies authorship, biography, and individualism.Fans of Gregory Betts's "Facebook Poem Project" or Rachel Zolf's Tolerance Project, along with anyone compelled by contemporary poetry and conceptual art, will connect with this pixelated investigation into identity, and the true meaning of 'self' as we and others define it.

  • Author:
    David, Carole, Winkler, Donald
    Summary:

    Winner of the 2016 Prix des LibrairesWinner of the 2016 Quebecor Prize for the Trois-Rivières Poetry Festival. Carole David's The Year of My Disappearance is a searing, surreal, darkly comic descent into a woman's psyche. From Governor General's Award winning translator, Donald Winkler, into English, comes this pitiless assault on the author's own torments and pretenses. Present here are figures lodged in her memory: lovers, strangers, her mother, and Bosch-like apparitions out of her dreams and imaginings. Through it all, a fierce combat is being waged between immolation and survival. As David has written, "I gave free range to the lives that dwelt within me." It's down this road the blind spot sings.

  • Author:
    Friesen, Victor Carl
    Summary:

    Henry David Thoreau is remembered as a foremost nature writer. He was an ecologist before the term was invented. A man of many parts, including social critic, he is known to have had an influence on such internationally recognized leaders as Gandhi and Martin Luther King. "Victor Carl Friesen, author of The Spirit of the Huckleberry, an astute analysis of Henry David Thoreau’s prose, again demonstrates his affinity for the Walden sage with this unique volume of poems and photographs. Taking a series of quotations demonstrating Thoreau’s sensuousness, he writes a poem for each and then illustrates them with outstanding colour photographs. The poems, mostly written in the blank verse form, have sturdy strength and remarkable insight into both Thoreau and nature."- Walter Harding, Founding Secretary, The Thoreau Society Inc., State University of New York, Genesco "Friesen is particularly qualified as a Thoreau scholar, for his personal interests extend well beyond literature to include natural history, a subject very much at the centre of Thoreau’s writings."- Canadian Book Review Annual

  • Author:
    Clewes, Rosemary
    Summary:

    The Woman Who Went to The Moon captures in poems, six days spent in the tiny community of Igloolik in the Arctic winter of January 2006. Ice-locked to the Melville Peninsula, Igloolik lies west of Baffin Island. This is the year of the Circumpolar Moon, where the full moon sweeps the heavens at the lowest point of its curve in its 18.6-year cycle. The poems are suffused with its light and the slow ebb of its celestial brightness in the days that follow, as the sun for first time in four months creeps over the horizon, heralding the approach of spring. The poems weave women’s igloo art, a community’s grief for teenage suicides, the immensity of landscape, and the tension between the Elder’s intuition and the outsiders’ science. Shifting between mythic tale-telling and the vibrancy of town life, these poems will speak to those for whom body, soul, and naming are not divisible.

  • Author:
    Bruck, Julie
    Summary:

    Winner of the 1994 A.M. Klein Prize for Poetry (QSPELL, now the Quebec Writers' Federation)

    In The Woman Downstairs, eloquence joins intimately with an attentive and hungry eye. Julie Bruck explores the accidents and acquaintances of life, its small coincidences and occurrences, its unexpected meetings. With a passionate distance, Bruck blends the outside observer's cool embrace with a desire to know intensely life’s eccentric smallnesses, to gentle the beautiful out of the mundane. By turns witty and thoughtful, Bruck's writing is always graceful, always a delight.

  • Author:
    Lane, M. Travis
    Summary:

    Winner, New Brunswick Book Award for PoetryA Quill & Quire Best Book of the Year. Like the novella in fiction, the long poem is an oft-neglected form. Too long for publication in most literary journals and anthologies, too short to merit book-length publication, the long poem occupies a lonely space in literature. M. Travis Lane is a master of the form, in which her considerable poetic skills reach their apex. There are few that match her brilliance. This volume collects all of her long works — most of them now out of print — from a five-decade commitment to the art. M. Travis Lane has long flown under the radar of Can Lit, crafting luminous poems and sharp literary criticism — much of it published in the Fiddlehead, one of Canada's premier literary journals — but in recent years her work has been drawing the attention it deserves. Evidence of this recognition is her 2015 Governor General's Award nomination for Crossover, a collection the still-vital poet published at the age of 81. Her poetry is modernist, dense, and highly allusive, drawing adeptly on classical and biblical sources, imbued with a feminist and ecocritical perspective. Her musical lines, vivid metaphors, and phenomenological acumen launch her into the company of such poetic luminaries as Don McKay, Jan Zwicky, and Tim Lilburn. In the long poetic form, these qualities reach their highest expression. This volume, an exquisite collection that brings together her long poems for the first time, constitutes an important addition to the canon of Canadian literature and to the canon of feminist literature in North America.

  • Author:
    Groulx, David
    Summary:

    In this poetry book, David Groulx seamlessly weaves the spiritual with the ordinary and the present with the powerful voices of the past. He speaks for the spirit, determination, and courage of Aboriginal people, compelling readers to confront cruel reality with his sincere and inspiring vision. Author's poetic power renders an honest and painful perception of Aboriginal life with strong voice against prejudice and injustice.

  • Author:
    Crozier, Lorna
    Summary:

    A testament to the miraculous beings that share our planet and the places that they live, The Wild in You is a deeply-felt creative collaboration between one of our time’s best nature photographers and a very talented and creative poet. Inspired by the majestic and savage beauty of Ian McAllister’s photographs, Lorna Crozier translates the wild emotion of these images into the language of the human heart: poetry. Featuring over 30 beautiful full-size photographs of wolves, bears, sea lions, jellyfish, and other wild creatures paired with 30 original poems, The Wild in You challenges the reader to a deeper understanding of the connection between humans, animals, and our shared earth.
    Published in Partnership with the David Suzuki Institute

  • Author:
    Cookshaw, Marlene
    Summary:

    Shortlisted for the 1990 Dorothy Livesay Award for Poetry (BC Book Prizes)

    Marlene Cookshaw is a Cheshire cat of a poet whose naturally realized details illuminate a shifting wholeness on the "singing edge" between dream and waking. Hers is a quilted language at once covering and revealing our fascinating ordinariness. The long poem "In The Swim" subtly captures the desperate and humourous beauty of a seemingly plain life closely observed. Other poems leap with deftness and daring across the open plain of our lives, leaving images so strong, so strange, they verge on myth.

  • Author:
    Harvey, Sarah N.
    Summary:

    Combining evocative haiku, informative text and luminous illustrations, The West Is Calling is a celebration, for our youngest readers, of one hundred and fifty years of British Columbia's history. Each detail-rich illustration depicts a particular moment in the province's dynamic saga, from pre-contact Haida culture, to the natural resources-fueled economic boom in the 1960s and beyond, to Expo 86, to the opening up of the North and the growing appreciation of First Nations' traditions.

  • Author:
    Green, Albena Beloved
    Summary:

    The Way We Hold On is Abena Beloved Green's debut book of poetry. Her poems address cultural, social, and environmental issues, relationships, and reflect on everyday life as a small-town raised, semi-nomadic, first-generation Canadian. Here are poems about holding on and letting go-of ideas, opinions, beliefs, people, places, and things.

  • Author:
    Smart, Carolyn
    Summary:

    The Way to Come Home is Carolyn Smart's fourth book of poems. It is a collection that ranges from celebrating the rural landscape north of Kingston, Ontario to re-creating the painful last phase of her friend Bronwen Wallace's life in a moving sequence titled "The Sound of the Birds." The volume's opening sequence, "Cape of Storms," views the hatred thriving amid the astonishing physical beauty of South Africa while "The woman is bathing" details a journey to Costa Rica that is a journey into the self. The outward eye is as acute as the inward in this powerful book.

  • Author:
    Heighton, Steven
    Summary:

    A collection of laments and celebrations that reflect on our struggle to believe in the future of a world that continues to disappoint us. The poet challenges the boundaries of sleep and even death in these meditations on what lies just beneath the surface of contemporary life. These are poems that trouble over the idea of failure even as they continually recommit to the present moment. This is fierce music performed in a minor key.

  • Author:
    O'Meara, David
    Summary:

    Winner of the 2004 Archibald Lampman Award (National Capital Region – Ottawa) and shortlisted for the 2004 Trillium Book Award for Poetry and the 2004 ReLit Awards

    In The Vicinity David O’Meara gives us a new kind of cityscape, one that brings its unseen, and usually unsung, materials to the foreground. Brick, concrete (that “not-so-silver screen / our walk-on parts are posed upon”), glass, steel, wire: they step boldly from anonymity into fresh focus, backdrops goaded into stardom. Full of casually-worn wit and humour, often using intricate forms that deftly reflect their subjects, these poems probe our conventional attitudes while walking us down present or remembered streets – “Some-such Avenue / Rue Saint Whatever.”

    A red brick wall, framed
    in timber beams and mortar,
    collects the last gold of November warmth
    on this lit morning.
    It hasn’t rested, though idle all these years.
    A brick wall is stoic toil.
    Compare one to your mother.

    from “Brickwork”

    “‘Let / how I loved to be here / not change,’ David O’Meara says, almost under his breath, in one of the stirring, subtle cadences he is perpetually discovering. The Vicinity wanders and wonders, seeking a possible home, and along the road it notices, savours, questions and praises every sight and sound, from a steel vertex to an old poster for a long-gone ska concert. Paradoxically, in his ‘fog of love, homelessness’ O’Meara’s innovative mastery of form and rhythm creates perfect, if fleeting, homes for the spirit at every step on these restless streets.” – A. F. Moritz

    Archibald Lampman Award for Poetry

    The 19th Archibald Lampman award goes this year to David O’Meara for his book of poetry, The Vicinity (published by Brick Books). The award is given annually by Arc, Canada’s National Poetry Magazine, for the best book of poetry written in English during the preceding calendar year by a writer living in Ottawa. Jury members Brian Bartlett of Halifax, Stephanie Bolster of Montreal, and Aislinn Hunter of Vancouver, had this to say about O’Meara’s book: “Though meticulously crafted, his lines never show off, always deferring not so much to their subjects as to the singular mind that moves through them.” “This book … looks hard at the common object and the day to day — how the ordinary can harbour its own kind of revelation.” “The poems show a rare balance of care and spontaneity, intelligence and intuition. This is an outstanding collection not just for the Nation’s Capital but for the nation, period.” The Vicinity is O’Meara’s second book of poetry. It has been short-listed for the Trillium Book Award for Poetry and also for the Ottawa Book Award.

  • Author:
    Bennett, Roxanna
    Summary:

    In "unmeaningable", her previous Trillium Poetry Awards winning book with Gordon Hill Press, Roxanna Bennett renovated the North American disability poetics canon via her queer fusion of invisible and visible disability identities. "The Untranslatable I" builds on Roxanna's acute sense of form and cripping of myth by establishing a more reflective, heartbreaking voice that asks, "Was I chosen? Is this a gift or a curse?" and provides answers not as prescribed path or cure, but as beautiful song.

  • Author:
    Burgham, Ian
    Summary:

    This is a collection inspired by Coleridge’s doctrine of bringing the “the whole soul of a man into activity."

  • Author:
    Scowcroft, Ann
    Summary:

    Winner of the 2011 Concordia University First Book Prize, Quebec Writers’ Federation Literary Awards

    Shortlisted for the 2012 Award for People’s Poetry (Acorn-Plantos Award Committee)

    Poems exploring the idea of home and the difficulties of a deeply ambiguous relationship to that word.

    At once wise and achingly at a loss, Ann Scowcroft’s The Truth of Houses is an elegant debut collection. While very intimate—even startlingly intimate at times—the voices of these poems are constantly taking a step backward, wrestling for a measure of distance and perspective. Reading them, we eavesdrop on the uncovering of a personal vernacular that might allow the present to be better lived; we have the sense of overhearing a particular yet eerily familiar inner struggle—a struggle for insight, for an equanimity with which both narrator and fortunate reader might re-enter life anew.

    All of which is to say: the houses aren’t fooled
    the houses know the five truths

    The truth of light: you will see before you understand
    The truth of motion: escape is an illusion
    The truth of trees: your busy life will dissolve into the soil
    The truth of windows: what protects can also maim

    The truth of peace:
    despite all the other truths
    knowing will come to you wearing one hundred faces
    contain you as once you contained your
    own blood

    —from “The Truth of Houses”

    “These are poems filled with the intricacies of life – subtle and human, anarchic and generous, intimate as well as far ranging in their time and geography. The Truth of Houses is a wonderful first collection of poems.” — Michael Ondaatje

    Winner of the 2011 Concordia University First Book Prize, Quebec Writers’ Federation Literary Awards

    About The Truth of Houses by Ann Scowcroft, the jurors wrote:

    “Ann Scowcroft’s first collection of poems astounds with its dense writing, as if the author had been accumulating, constructing her vision long enough and could hold back no longer. Oddly mesmerising in the imagery they provoke, these poems are at once intimate and universal.”

  • Author:
    Worth, Liz
    Summary:

    Pulling from raw themes of grief and death, regret and discomfort, sadness and failure, Worth wears these poems down to their bones. Straddling dreamy, ethereal images and brutal honesty, The Truth is Told Better This Way unravels its secrets one line at a time. The result is oracular and surreal, as each piece could be read as a magic spell that mesmerizes as much as a poem that tantalizes the senses.

  • Author:
    Goyette, Sue
    Summary:

    Nominated for the 1999 Governor General’s Award for Poetry, the 1999 Pat Lowther Award and the 1999 Gerald Lampert Award and Globe 100 book for 1999

    The True Names of Birds is the first book-length collection from a voice that has captured the attention of Canadian poetry readers for the last half-dozen years. Deeply centred in domestic life, Goyette’s work is informed by a muscular lyricism. These are poems that push the limits, always true to their roots.

    “This is a fresh new voice with a tense lyrical intelligence. This is a collection to begin everything with, a cure for silence, secrets that arrive with a steady eloquence.” – Patrick Lane

  • Author:
    Rice, Bruce
    Summary:

    Bruce Rice was moved to words by the natural beauty he saw during repeated travels along Seven Bridges Road just west of Regina and in the landscape around Eastend and the Cypress Hills in southwestern Saskatchewan. As he sought to express the beauty he saw in those places on their own terms, without imposing the ego of the poet, he found resonances of himself in what he was seeing – the landscape began to write him. Distinguished by its long unhurried lines and its vivid descriptions of the Saskatchewan landscape, The Trouble with Beauty is an absorbing and moving collection of poetry about the contemporary hunger for transcendence or, what the poet calls "the mysteries/God didn't plan for." Powerfully elegiac, these poems can be read as a single sequence, an ongoing almanac of the poet's inner weather, in which epiphanies are hair-triggered to the most ordinary occurrences – the push of a breath on the back of a small clump of grass.

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