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Slovenly Love

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  • Publisher:
    Brick Books, 2003
    Note: This book was purchased with support from the Government of Canada's Social Development Partnerships Program - Disability Component.

Details:

  • Author: Cook, Méira
    Date:
    Created
    2003
    Summary:

    Longlisted for the 2004 ReLit Awards

    Slovenly Love is Méira Cook’s third book of poetry. A Fine Grammar of Bones and Toward a Catalogue of Falling, both collections of lyrics, are now joined by a fascinating long poem composed of five sequences. “A Year of Birds” sensuously explores erosion of self in the gain of new life in motherhood; “Blue Lines” concerns a woman and her double, the imperishable self she “left” to become the self she is; “Trawling: a biography of the river” introduces Heraclitus into the Winnipeg Flood of 1997, the Red River becoming a river of the mind; “Kiss by the Hôotel de Ville,” an extended meditation on varieties of dislocation between art and reality, focuses on Robert Doisneau’s famous photograph of the same title; “Tempestuous” is a passionate, Miranda-centred reading of Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Each sequence is distinct, but together they explore a life of gap, fragment, flux. “Ah swift-wingèd youth,” says a voice in “Trawling,” “the world is, was, and ever will be full of wonder.” Slovenly Love, in its exhilarating renovation of words and forms, gorgeously confirms that.

    Says she favours tattoos, impermanent
    as the memory of these blue lines. Hey,
    beautiful, throw me a line, she calls,
    too low to hear. Every third word slightly
    erased, as if blurred by a wet thumb. Always
    known we are lost in a long poem, fragmented
    to gloss memory, she says.
    Nevertheless, she adds, treading water,
    I am not as melancholy as I seem to be
    when that complaint escapes me.

    from “Blue Lines”

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