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Toward a Catalogue of Falling

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  • Publisher:
    Brick Books, 1996
    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
    1996
    Summary:

    Shortlisted for the 1997 Pat Lowther Award and for the 1997 McNally Robinson Book of the Year Award

    Toward a Catalogue of Falling, Méira Cook’s second full-length book, proves that the fall into language can be both graceful and startling. Whether she is rewriting Hans Christian Anderson’s “The Little Mermaid” (as she does in her poem sequence “Days of Water”), thinking of Breughel’s/Williams’/ Auden’s Icarus, reading oranges, or offering advice for catching crows, Cook’s words are luminous. Language is a character in these poems, along with circus performers, Venetian tour guides, clumsy sons and migrating geese. Cook writes poems that bless hearts turned to salt, and revive the silenced energies of words. Always unexpected, always elegant, this is language that endures.

    “The poems are dramatic rushes of words, vibrant and intense…. Some are bizarre narratives fusing the wild ‘slanguage’ of Eliza Clark and Ondaatje-like exotica.” for A Fine Grammar of Bones – George Elliott Clarke

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