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A Broken Bowl

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  • Publisher:
    Brick Books, 1997
    Note: This book was purchased with support from the Government of Canada's Social Development Partnerships Program - Disability Component.

Details:

  • Date:
    Created
    1997
    Summary:

    Shortlisted for the 1997 Governor General’s Award for Poetry

    Set firmly at the end of the millennium, A Broken Bowl takes on the burden of history, with its heaped atrocities, its unimaginable sufferings. This long poem is an angry lament, a summoning of fragments, a meditation in the midst of an exhausted world. By turns lyric, satiric, elegiac and incantatory, A Broken Bowl is filled with passionate elemental writing in the tradition of Howl and Crow.

    “Picture-building poetry doesn’t get better than this. Patrick Friesen communicates directly to your imagination. These fragments of a broken bowl are, indeed, much greater than the sum of their parts as they spur imaginal encounters not only with Friesen but with the scattered bits of the reader’s self – each piece a new gesture to try on.” – Per Brask

    “These are the end days – someone’s got a kitchen knife and is ‘looking for the government’; the river is a ‘filthy transfusion.’ Patrick Friesen sings this dark song with beauty and a guttering love. We’re long past apology, reconstruction: there’s only Friesen’s voice not nearly enough, sure, but the only thing worthy of trust.” – Tim Lilburn

    Subject(s): Canadian poetry
    Original Publisher: London, Brick Books
    Language(s): English
    Collection(s)/Series: Brick Books Poetry