Wednesday, April 30, 2014

ROVE - Laurie D Graham (Hagios Press) - 2014 Gerald Lampert Memorial Award Nominee

For the month of April this blog will be looking at the nominees for the 2014 Pat Lowther Memorial Award, Raymond Souster Award and the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award as recognized by the the League of Canadian Poets.

The Pat Lowther Memorial Award is given for a book of poetry by a Canadian woman published in the preceding year, and is in memory of the late Pat Lowther, whose career was cut short by her untimely death in 1975. The award carries a $1,000 prize. It is presented each year at the League’s Annual General Meeting in May or June, with the shortlist announced in April.
http://poets.ca/contests-awards/pat-lowther/

The Raymond Souster Award is given for a book of poetry by a League of Canadian Poets member (all levels, dues paid) published in the preceding year. The award honours Raymond Souster, an early founder of the League of Canadian Poets. The award carries a $1,000 prize. It is presented each year at the LCP Annual Poetry Festival and Conference in June, with the shortlist announced in April.
http://poets.ca/contests-awards/raymond-souster/

The Gerald Lampert Memorial Award is given in the memory of Gerald Lampert, an arts administrator who organized authors’ tours and took a particular interest in the work of new writers. The award recognizes the best first book of poetry published by a Canadian in the preceding year. The Award carries a prize of $1,000 and is sponsored by the League of Canadian Poets. It is presented each year at the League’s Annual General Meeting in May or June, with the shortlist announced in April.
http://poets.ca/contests-awards/gerald-lampert/

...

Today's book of poetry:
ROVE.  Laurie D Graham.  Hagios Press.  Regina, SK.  2013.


Rove  is an elegant epic poem so rooted in the soil of the Canadian west it comes from that you might find some earth under your fingernails every time you turn a page.

from Rove

Were there buffalo here? Will there be crops planted?
The family round the table never talking

about what they have to do to get the land working. The Saturday
dances get told, the roving packs of musicians,

the roving doctors, the young men
on the threshing crews — those three nice Indian brothers,

what were their names, saying catcha mayesh
for (Russian text) to the women in town —

going to church, singing Mass;
the blessed bread,

the tidied graves. Then oil is discovered and they rove away.
Two generation of farmers: the wars

fought to have this right to vacate.
See the branches of the suburbs blossom wild with bungalows.

See the grass-green, the oil refinery, the tight grey brickwork of a city
shamed to forgetfulness. Big Bear, look, these brick lanes

are the reason you were starved off. Wandering Spirit, look,
no place for a warrior but the streets and penthouses;

this is why you were hung. Look, there's no ground here;
they've stretched concrete flat. Look how big,

the houses in the valley, look at this religion of parking lots.
You know they plant these crops all over.

They won't tell us how much the oil wells spend —
they show the paper flying from hands and pockets.

And look how people beg on corners,
bless the rotgut whisky,

look they rove on air and water,
gazing down the blinking planet.

Look what they do no sleep inside.
And remember how the soldiers kept on coming.

...

Laurie D Graham does stuff here that only my favourite jazz musicians can do with confidence.  She riffs fantastic.  This is sustained lyricism of such clear purpose and language that it is a privilege to read.

I do apologize for not being able to reproduce the short phrase in Russian that appears in the above, my Cyrillic typing skills have abandoned me.

more from Rove

See this Robin Hood give and give.
To this home, a fig tree arching at the bay window

               from within its net of lights.
In front of this house, a tricycle,

                           a satellite dish,
Out of this house, the old lady now

             walking her beer cans to the trash bin in the park.
In this house, a football ref

with coke-bottle glasses and legions of rose bushes.
In this one, an English professor will give up

and amass arrowheads and jazz records.
Into this house we can't imagine

for the foil over the windows.
              This house, two stories tall, impossible to see.

In this one, Stevie Ray Vaughan
                           and the woman always a mess.

              In this one, the neighbours come over
and stay till morning.

At this one, the kids won't come
inside until the dad's home from work.

                           This house refuses to shear the yard these days.
                           This house dries bedsheets on the verandah at night.

In this one, a man beats his dog with a broom handle.
Out front of this one, an old guy waters his driveway.

In back of this one, there's always a rink when it's cold.
This house keeps their garbage bins in front

and a stake and a chain for a missing dog.
Out of this house there's pipesmoke and a woodstove,

                           a big beard, a library.
In front of this one, gnomes and flamingos.

In this one, a girl shaved her head.
In this house, no Christmas,

                           no birthdays, the weirdest boy.
In this house, a fat kid plots his revenge,

              shimmering and Romanian.
                           See this house neigbouring the basement preschool,

letting the kids scream in their yard after.
Tell everyone this house always smells

                                                        of old potatoes.
Tell this one always with milk on the doorstep.

                              Say this house, its one-eyed tabby
arching at the window. Say the fig tree within its net of lights.

...

Rove has a driving narrative as big as any western novel and sweeps over the plains like big weather.  There is an unbroken white light surging uninterrupted through these pages.  Laurie D Graham is seriously strong on the page.  These couplets drive themselves into your brain with the force of a fist and resonate like a caress.

more from Rove

If there's calm in belonging.
Like when there's a storm and the power goes out:

if there's a thinning, nothing to do but look out your window,
the trees that make you,

bending. Cacophony of throat and ribcage; the lodged
song out of tune.

Something about need and order.  And loss can behave like blessing,
but it's always loss.

...

Not sure how Graham got to be so wise but reading Rove certainly makes me appreciate it.

This is marvelous poetry and certainly one of the best books I've read this year.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Laurie D Graham grew up in Sherwood Park, Alberta, and now lives in London, Ontario, where she is a poet, teacher, and editor of Brick, A Literary Journal. Her poems has appeared in numerous Canadian journals and anthologies, including Event, Arc, The Malahat Review, and Best Canadian Poetry 2012.

COVER BLURBS
"The struggle to live deeply in the West, rather than just operate and extractive, Hudson Bay Company grab-and-run, continues, it seems, generation after generation. Laurie D Graham carries the project forward with luminous, sweet vigor in Rove.  This brilliant, large-hearted poem is where the quest of Suknaski, Kroetsch, MacKinnon and Zwicky has gone, picking up new, idiosyncratic preoccupations along the way.  How good it is to have this book."
     Tim Lilburn

"Choked with grief but still singing its makeshift litanies...claiming its "half-right to tell half story," Rove is a refreshingly humble ad-hoc tour through a land and a family. It took me in, worked with what it had at hand, and fed me."
     Alayna Munce

www.hagiospress.com

NOTE
I would like to personally thank Laurie D Graham for sending TODAY'S BOOK OF POETRY a copy of her book.  Hagios Press politely declined our request for copies of the two books Hagios published that were nominated for awards.  As a result I won't be able to look at Murray Reiss's The Survival Rate of Butterflies in the Wild (Hagios Press) which was also nominated for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award this year.



Monday, April 28, 2014

SURGE NARROWS - Emilia Nielsen (Leaf Press) - 2014 Gerald Lampert Memorial Award Nominee

For the month of April this blog will be looking at the nominees for the 2014 Pat Lowther Memorial Award, Raymond Souster Award and the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award as recognized by the the League of Canadian Poets.

The Pat Lowther Memorial Award is given for a book of poetry by a Canadian woman published in the preceding year, and is in memory of the late Pat Lowther, whose career was cut short by her untimely death in 1975. The award carries a $1,000 prize. It is presented each year at the League’s Annual General Meeting in May or June, with the shortlist announced in April.
http://poets.ca/contests-awards/pat-lowther/

The Raymond Souster Award is given for a book of poetry by a League of Canadian Poets member (all levels, dues paid) published in the preceding year. The award honours Raymond Souster, an early founder of the League of Canadian Poets. The award carries a $1,000 prize. It is presented each year at the LCP Annual Poetry Festival and Conference in June, with the shortlist announced in April.
http://poets.ca/contests-awards/raymond-souster/

The Gerald Lampert Memorial Award is given in the memory of Gerald Lampert, an arts administrator who organized authors’ tours and took a particular interest in the work of new writers. The award recognizes the best first book of poetry published by a Canadian in the preceding year. The Award carries a prize of $1,000 and is sponsored by the League of Canadian Poets. It is presented each year at the League’s Annual General Meeting in May or June, with the shortlist announced in April.
http://poets.ca/contests-awards/gerald-lampert/

...

Today's book of poetry:
Surge Narrows.  Emilia Nielsen.  Leaf Press.  Lantzville, B.C., 2013



"Surge Narrows is gorgeously sensual and sharply precise — if we could taste it, this book would be salmonberry.  It would be salt.  To read these poems is to stand under a waterfall, letting the words rush like cold, clean water over the skin.  A powerful debut."
     Anne Simpson

Vernacular Hearts

1

The heart is getting shit-faced.  Can't hold the gaze
of tetchy waitresses, bartenders. Cleans its pocket knife.
Sharpens fork tines. Just because. Tests irony. Stiff upper
lip and downing another round. The heart is doing a bit
of pickling, a bit of self-preservation. Has never been so
wrought. Likes it straight up, no chaser.

...

"I would highly recommend this book for those who love or are native to the west coast.  It’s so lovely to read a poem that compares “unruly hair” to old man’s beard (it’s a kind of moss that’s especially useful as nature’s toilet paper—you’re welcome).  To me, reading these poems is like a trip home, to the woods behind the house where I grew up, to the landscapes I drove through on road trips, to the secluded beaches and forests I miss when I’m living in the big city. If you need another reason to pick up this book, let me tell you Emilia Nielsen has top-rate taste in fellow Canadian women poets; she quotes Roo Borson (“I think my heart is a sad device”) and Phyllis Webb (“My universe opens. I close. / And open, just to surprise you.”)  Are not you convinced?
     Casey - The Canadian Lesbrarian
     ( http://caseythecanadianlesbrarian.wordpress.com/2013/08/14/the-heart-has-never-         surfaced-more-queer-a-review-of-emilia-nielsens-poetry-collection-surge-narrows/)

Surge

Drawn to smaller islands,
forts surrounded by ocean,
we begged the skipper to beach
the homeward bound school skiff,
forget rising bread dough. Wait,
we wanted to roam moss bluff and tideline
scoping good trees for hammocks, berries, warm tide pools,
sites for our future cabins.

We'd do high school by correspondence
instead to moving to town, get dogs and speedboats,
learn to make root beer, become hermits together.
Said we wouldn't leave.

...

The selections I've included are but fragments of the finished works - and have a strength of their own, but naturally these fragments don't carry the weight of the completed poems.

Here is Nielsen's poem "Indifferent Season" in its entirety.

Indifferent Season

i

Down-at-the heel, undone:
the weather, galvanized.

There ain't no cure for
the summertime blues.

Yellowjackets held with-
in their skin's slim bars.

Migraine's fluorescent hum;
a cloudburst, a flash flood


ii

Fire, water, a stainless kettle. Pungent tea:
blessed thistle, passionflower, angelica.

Give me a moment to Ophelia, to float-
summer's too much in love with its own heat.

Artemisia Gentileschi's Judith. Artemisia
absinthium: aphrodisiac, bitter stimulant?

Kiss my collarbone, my someday tattoo:
blue water lily. Offer me one breast.


iii

Pray for a life without plot,
a day without narrative.

This kick of gas flame, weeping
willow, for taprooted melancholia.

Monotony, straight country gravel,
traffic jeering past fallow fields.

A millstone, a horse on the road:
Slow Down and Circle Wide.


iv

Cherries, black plum, blood orange:
my breakfast vividly carnivorous.

The turkey vulture's wings a scythe,
dihedral; its aerial circumambulation.

Wild carrot: umbel of white needlepoint
lace, tiny central flower a red pinprick.

A mouthful of mad chickenpox berries,
tongue an itching curse - calamine, ice!


v

Rain-barrel drinking water
heady with yellow pollen.

The body's brash reflex:
antler flush; summer's rut.

Neither for me honey
nor the honey bee.

My mouth, obtuse:
no spark of new love.


vi

Full moon's zenith;
an aster gone to seed.

Spent the hot morning
reinventing the wheel.

Curios: moondog, halo,
opal, howl, dog star...

Garden plot chock-a-
block with dandelions.

...


ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Emilia Nielsen was born on Vancouver Island and now lives in Vancouver, BC.  Her poetry has appeared in literary journals across Canada including: The Antigonish Review, Descant, Event, Contemporary Verse 2, The Fiddlehead, Grain, Prarie Fire, Room Magazine, and was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in Poetry by PRISM international.  Currently, she teaches in the Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice in the Faculty of Arts at the University of British Columbia.




Saturday, April 26, 2014

THE PLACE OF SCRAPS - Jordan Abel (Talonbooks) - 2014 Gerald Lampert Memorial Award Nominee

For the month of April this blog will be looking at the nominees for the 2014 Pat Lowther Memorial Award, Raymond Souster Award and the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award as recognized by the the League of Canadian Poets.

The Pat Lowther Memorial Award is given for a book of poetry by a Canadian woman published in the preceding year, and is in memory of the late Pat Lowther, whose career was cut short by her untimely death in 1975. The award carries a $1,000 prize. It is presented each year at the League’s Annual General Meeting in May or June, with the shortlist announced in April.
http://poets.ca/contests-awards/pat-lowther/

The Raymond Souster Award is given for a book of poetry by a League of Canadian Poets member (all levels, dues paid) published in the preceding year. The award honours Raymond Souster, an early founder of the League of Canadian Poets. The award carries a $1,000 prize. It is presented each year at the LCP Annual Poetry Festival and Conference in June, with the shortlist announced in April.
http://poets.ca/contests-awards/raymond-souster/

The Gerald Lampert Memorial Award is given in the memory of Gerald Lampert, an arts administrator who organized authors’ tours and took a particular interest in the work of new writers. The award recognizes the best first book of poetry published by a Canadian in the preceding year. The Award carries a prize of $1,000 and is sponsored by the League of Canadian Poets. It is presented each year at the League’s Annual General Meeting in May or June, with the shortlist announced in April.
http://poets.ca/contests-awards/gerald-lampert/

...

Today's book of poetry:
The Place of Scraps.  Jordan Abel.  Talonbooks.  Vancouver, B.C. 2013.



The following is a brief description of his own work from Jordan Abel:

place-of-scraps-feature
My first book is forthcoming from Talonbooks this fall. Here’s brief description:
The Place of Scraps revolves around Marius Barbeau, an early-twentieth-century ethnographer, who studied many of the First Nations cultures in the Pacific Northwest, including Jordan Abel’s ancestral Nisga’a Nation. Barbeau, in keeping with the popular thinking of the time, believed First Nations cultures were about to disappear completely, and that it was up to him to preserve what was left of these dying cultures while he could. Unfortunately, his methods of preserving First Nations cultures included purchasing totem poles and potlatch items from struggling communities in order to sell them to museums. While Barbeau strove to protect First Nations cultures from vanishing, he ended up playing an active role in dismantling the very same cultures he tried to save.
Drawing inspiration from Barbeau’s canonical book Totem Poles, Jordan Abel explores the complicated relationship between First Nations cultures and ethnography. His poems simultaneously illuminate Barbeau’s intentions and navigate the repercussions of the anthropologist’s actions.
Through the use of erasure techniques, Abel carves out new understandings of Barbeau’s writing – each layer reveals a fresh perspective, each word takes on a different connotation, each letter plays a different role, and each punctuation mark rises to the surface in an unexpected way. As Abel writes his way ever deeper into Barbeau’s words, he begins to understand that he is much more connected to Barbeau than he originally suspected.
...

"With his breakout collection of visual poetry... Abel conjures the near impossible: a heartbreaking history lesson, both personal and public, mixed with lyricism, intelligence, humour, and cold-eyed facts.  This narrative of the misguided, good-hearted Marius Barbeau and what he did with First Nations cultural icons will be a revelation for many.  What Abel takes from language is what gives it form and strength: a more apt use of plunder verse I cannot imagine."
     -Caroline Smart

"English litters the sky, its typed letters eventually demolished into illegible insects that flit above the archival photo-testimony to land/people... A surprising and necessary book of poetry, The Place of Scraps is as humbly unstoppable as the next breath you take in and release back out to the world."
     -Rita Wong

"This is art of the concept, used to unmake language so that language may live."
     -Wade Compton

...

I was unable to reproduce Jordan Abel's work in the same way as it is presented in The Place of Scraps.  This is a result of my technical shortcomings and general Luddite abilities on my computer.  My apologies to Mr. Abel and to Talonbooks.

...

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jordan Abel is a First Nations writer who lives in Vancouver.  He holds a BA from the University of Alberta and an MFA from the University of British Columbia.  Abel is an editor for Poetry is Dead magazine and the former poetry editor for PRISM international.  His work has been published in many journals and magazines across Canada, including CV2, Capilano Review, Prairie Fire, dANDelion, Geist, ARC Poetry Magazine, Descant, Broken Pencil, OCW Magazine, filling station, Grain, and Canadian Literature.  In early 2013 above/ground Press published his chapbook Scienta.


Jordan Abel - The Place of Scraps - launch



www.talonbooks.com

Wednesday, April 23, 2014

BIRDS, METALS, STONES & RAIN - Russell Thornton (Harbour Publishing) - 2014 Raymond Souster Award Nominee

For the month of April this blog will be looking at the nominees for the 2014 Pat Lowther Memorial Award, Raymond Souster Award and the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award as recognized by the the League of Canadian Poets.

The Pat Lowther Memorial Award is given for a book of poetry by a Canadian woman published in the preceding year, and is in memory of the late Pat Lowther, whose career was cut short by her untimely death in 1975. The award carries a $1,000 prize. It is presented each year at the League’s Annual General Meeting in May or June, with the shortlist announced in April.
http://poets.ca/contests-awards/pat-lowther/

The Raymond Souster Award is given for a book of poetry by a League of Canadian Poets member (all levels, dues paid) published in the preceding year. The award honours Raymond Souster, an early founder of the League of Canadian Poets. The award carries a $1,000 prize. It is presented each year at the LCP Annual Poetry Festival and Conference in June, with the shortlist announced in April.
http://poets.ca/contests-awards/raymond-souster/

The Gerald Lampert Memorial Award is given in the memory of Gerald Lampert, an arts administrator who organized authors’ tours and took a particular interest in the work of new writers. The award recognizes the best first book of poetry published by a Canadian in the preceding year. The Award carries a prize of $1,000 and is sponsored by the League of Canadian Poets. It is presented each year at the League’s Annual General Meeting in May or June, with the shortlist announced in April.
http://poets.ca/contests-awards/gerald-lampert/

...

Today's book of poetry:
Birds, Metals, Stones & Rain.  Russell Thornton.  Harbour Publishing. Madeira Park, B.C.. 2013.



 "Why doesn't Russell Thornton have a wider readership?...Thornton has written another collection of deeply affecting, impeccably constructed poems that recover and restore a life lived, imagined, re-lived and ultimately wrested from the swamp of the personal to become common language.  Parable, oneiric memoir, family history and flights of song all appear..."
     -Ken Babstock, Globe and Mail

Rain Wolf, West Coast Trail

It is standing at the edge
of a clearing, pale glacial
eyes narrow and lined in black,
the wolf's kohl. The entire wolf
the thick kohl of my own eyes,
it brings jagged grew trees, stones
lying alive on the ground, rain
like a bead-curtained doorway,
steel wool cloud and the dark's sheen
sharp into my eyes. Without
any flaw in its fury,
a wolf of antimony,
eater of impurities,
it eats the decrepit kind
of my eyes and a reborn
king emerges from a fire,
the burned wolf hissing like rain
and shaking away the ash.
The trees have burned up, the wolf
lifts its nose to smoke, charcoal,
and licks the visible clean,
leaving the two pinpoint lights
of its eyes in the dawn air.

...

"Always alert to the ephemeral, Thornton makes of spring's first sparrows 'little light-carpenters,' because the season will end; he looks with tenderness at the 'woe-papery faces' of late-night bus travellers, knowing that daylight will flatten those faces.  And so, when in a gritty, long-gone North Vancouver bar of his memory he sees Cezanne's apples 'about to slide off new surfaces,' one admires not only his startling juxtaposition but his ability to see what others would have missed, to trust what he sees, to make us see it, too."
     -Stephanie Bolster

Playing With Stones

When I carry her home each evening
from the park playground swing, she pleads with me
to let her walk on the bed of smooth stones
at the front of our apartment building.
She wants to find individual stones
and put them in her wide pocket, then place
the same stones along a row of large rocks.
I would like us to stay as we are now
within the flowering and flowing gold
gaze of the sun' late rays. And suddenly
I imagine a day when she is old.
As if I were her child and she was soon
to be gone, I begin to grieve for her, 
little mother, my daughter. Carrying
her shepherdess's bag filled with her stones,
one for each sheep in her flock, already
she is keeping count for when it is night
and she brings the sheep into the stone fold,
already she is asking that they all
be kept in the great invisible scrip.
The tears she comes to cry for those she loves,
the tears others who love her cry for her,
will stray and go lost,  so she places stones
one by one on flat rock, stones that are tears
she gathered as they rolled out of the sun.

...

"Masterful lyrics and short narratives of great beauty by a fine poet.  They are impeccable in their craft.  You read them, only to go back and read them, carefully, again."
     -Patrick Lane

The Aeschylus Rock

Fresh corpse of a baby gull
splayed against a shore rock.
Feathers, guts, skin case, stain,
the sections of the skeleton
like parts of a pictograph,
neck, skull, eye hole, keel,
ribs, ilium, wing bones, claws,
thing that had not flown long
dropped by an eagle or hawk.

The tide will find it in an hour
and take what is left of it,
but for now the bones manacle
the carcass to the dry rock
while the shore rats run out
of nests to get at it. Sunlight
embraces it. The thief of first
deep within the rock drinks
and eats it and lives forever.

...

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Russell Thornton is the author of several collections of poetry, among them House Built of Rain (Harbour, 2003), which was a finalist for the Dorothy Livesay Prize (BC Book Prizes) and the ReLit Award, and The Human Shore (Harbour, 2006). His poetry has appeared widely in Canadian literary journals, and anthologies.  He won the League of Canadian Poets National Contest in 2000 and The Fiddlehead magazine's Ralph Gustafson Poetry Prize in 2009.  He has lived in Montreal, Aberystwyth, Wales, and Salonica, Greece. He now lives where he was born and grew up, in North Vancouver.





Russell Thornton reading "The man who sleeps in cemeteries".  March 21, 2010


www.harbourpublishing.com

Monday, April 21, 2014

REBEL WOMEN - Vancy Kasper (Inanna Publications) - 2014 Raymond Souster Award Nominee

For the month of April this blog will be looking at the nominees for the 2014 Pat Lowther Memorial Award, Raymond Souster Award and the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award as recognized by the the League of Canadian Poets.

The Pat Lowther Memorial Award is given for a book of poetry by a Canadian woman published in the preceding year, and is in memory of the late Pat Lowther, whose career was cut short by her untimely death in 1975. The award carries a $1,000 prize. It is presented each year at the League’s Annual General Meeting in May or June, with the shortlist announced in April.
http://poets.ca/contests-awards/pat-lowther/

The Raymond Souster Award is given for a book of poetry by a League of Canadian Poets member (all levels, dues paid) published in the preceding year. The award honours Raymond Souster, an early founder of the League of Canadian Poets. The award carries a $1,000 prize. It is presented each year at the LCP Annual Poetry Festival and Conference in June, with the shortlist announced in April.
http://poets.ca/contests-awards/raymond-souster/

The Gerald Lampert Memorial Award is given in the memory of Gerald Lampert, an arts administrator who organized authors’ tours and took a particular interest in the work of new writers. The award recognizes the best first book of poetry published by a Canadian in the preceding year. The Award carries a prize of $1,000 and is sponsored by the League of Canadian Poets. It is presented each year at the League’s Annual General Meeting in May or June, with the shortlist announced in April.
http://poets.ca/contests-awards/gerald-lampert/

...


Today's book of poetry:
Rebel Women.  Vancy Kasper.  Inanna Publications.  Toronto, Ontario.  2013.


Vancy Kasper has been a feminist for over 30 years.  That's a long time to spend making oneself heard.  Luckily for us Rebel Women calls upon the voices of generations of women.

Sunday in the Wartime Nursery

Aunt's fingers,
nicotined and yellow
match the chalk lines
on the fabric.
A smooth dart is not in the pinning.
A flat dart is not in the sewing.
She pulls and stretches,
lays the material under the needle.
It's in the pressing.  All in the pressing.
Her feet rock the treadle
back and forth         back and forth.
Then she holds up the pressmitt and spits on the iron.

Her niece, climbs up off the floor,
heaving and rumpled with cheap green garbardine
She is here for a reason
she only partially understands.

On weekdays, three floors below,
her aunt's hands, stiff and blue-veined,
beat egg whites with a fork.
Floating Island pudding for 67 children
whose fathers could be driving jeeps,
or mothers, lured by ambulances,
at the Bellevue Avenue Wartime Day Nursery.

Had her wrists forgotten those seven years
at the Berlin Conservatory?
She barely remembers her salad days;
her mildewed flat on Lindenstrasse
or Hans, whom she had kissed,
married and then left.

She's abandoned Greta, Reiner and Carl
whom she'd hugged, studied with, watched perform.
Her fingers still argue with Wagner
but she's misplaced any memory
of the Carnegie Hall debut, the ovations, reviews.

Her son volunteers for the RCAF.
Now at 18 he flies a Lockheed bomber,
low over Berlin blackouts.

She waits -- lights another cigarette --
every Sunday, teaches her niece to be a tailor.
An international profession.

...

These poems are rich with strong, independent women telling us about the social history of our world and times - because recorded history, until very recently, was "HISstory", and generally concentrated on the deeds of "Great" men.  Kasper brings life to the poignant sounds of several generations of women as they discuss their lives with passion.  These are lives full of hardship and loss, lives where women have borne witness and now Kasper animates their voices.

Big Black Sunshiny Day

for Ayanna Black

My friend is wearing her brand new cap
as she lifts her arm, now savaged of flesh.
We are toasting the biggest black day in history.
"Remember that time I offered you South African wine?" I say.
"And you said, 'I hope you choke on it.'"
Our laughter has patina
on Obama's election day.
She sips - and these things within her, sip too.
She leans forward - her stick-like fingers
reach for some of my roasted garlic.
"When we met you had short hair," I smile,
as she fails to pat shorn dreadlocks.
Her cap falls off, as bald-headed now,
she looks up at the waiter, and orders quiche.
She knows these things inside
will enjoy eggs and milk so alien
to her 90 pound once rigid vegetarian body.
"You don't have the look, yet," I say.
"You got rid it of it."

"But I eat for two or three now" she says.
"Here's to Obama, and to me not getting the look."

...

Vancy Kasper has published one previous volume of poetry, Mother I'm So Glad You Taught Me How To Dance, as well as award winning Young Adult fiction.  Kasper, a former reporter and magazine feature writer, brings a high level of professionalism to her poetry, but never at the cost of a loss of passion.

Rebel Women

for Catherine

There are herbs, Catherine,
my Great-Great Grandmother was told --
tansy can slow a heart,
hibernate the trouble.

She had tied a Rebel ribbon around
her son's arm and knew it was too early
to roll the Christmas pies
- apple, sparse, crabapple.
Give us this day, our daily --
slap hard on the board for
Mrs. Lount, 30 miles north-east --
her arms aching from the waving,
roll and roll for Mrs. Matthews.
The Lord is our Shepherd
Does she have a letter too?
Crouching between candlesticks,
sealed against defeat, penned
by her sons, like mine?
Anointest their heads with oil,
flute the apples for Mrs. Anderson

Dear God, do we have enough pennies for the eyes?

The icy ground between the oak and birch
is thickened by their Rebel sons,
their fathers, brothers and husbands,
who stumble with courage -- towards York.

Forgive them their trespasses

Eerie winds this December
deafen these Rebel mothers, wives and sisters
with pitchforks under, piles on, their tables.
They do no look out
at wind and ice bending pines
wood for coffins.

...


These characters aren't bigger than life, they are life, the rich unrecorded lives of our mothers, sisters, daughters, friends.  All of these women know their own horrors of conflict whether it is war and rebellion or in the home.  Vancy Kasper has given them a voice.


www.inanna.ca

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Vancy Kasper is a Toronto poet, author and journalist. Her work includes her first poetry collection, Mother, I'm So Glad You Taught Me How to Dance; the best-selling Young Adult novel, Always Ask For a Transfer and Y.A. novels Escape to Freedom (First Honourable Mention, Canadian Library Association) and Street of Three Directions, also published in Italy. Her poems have been published in Fireweed, Canadian Women's Studies, Quarry, Waves, and Landscape and have been broadcast on Bravo TV, CKLN and the University of Toronto radio station. She has Poet in Residence in various Ontario schools. One of the first members of the Women's Writing Collective, she was a features writer for the Toronto Star for nine years. She is included in Greg Gatenby's Literary Toronto.

BACK COVER BLURB:
In Rebel Women, Vancy Kaspar compellingly calls up the voices and stories of her grandmother and great-grandmother, women who were part of the 1837 Rebellion.  She inhabits these "Rebel mothers, wives and sisters" back in time, these women, "...eyes blue with poems," and writes with searing passion and unrelenting yearning of their everyday lives.  Vancy's heartfelt words and authentic photographs bear witness to these women's lives, full of fear and hardship, disgraces and lost dreams, but strength and resilience, too.  And what also emerges as these women lay Vancy "to sleep on a bed of poems" is a portrait of another strong woman, who in the last portion of this collection, sings remembrances of mother, father, friends, with love and sensitivity.
     Renee Norman, author of Martha in the Mirror


Saturday, April 19, 2014

INCARNATE - Juleta Severson-Baker (Frontenac House Poetry) - 2014 Gerald Lampert Memorial Award Nominee

For the month of April this blog will be looking at the nominees for the 2014 Pat Lowther Memorial Award, Raymond Souster Award and the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award as recognized by the the League of Canadian Poets.

The Pat Lowther Memorial Award is given for a book of poetry by a Canadian woman published in the preceding year, and is in memory of the late Pat Lowther, whose career was cut short by her untimely death in 1975. The award carries a $1,000 prize. It is presented each year at the League’s Annual General Meeting in May or June, with the shortlist announced in April.
http://poets.ca/contests-awards/pat-lowther/

The Raymond Souster Award is given for a book of poetry by a League of Canadian Poets member (all levels, dues paid) published in the preceding year. The award honours Raymond Souster, an early founder of the League of Canadian Poets. The award carries a $1,000 prize. It is presented each year at the LCP Annual Poetry Festival and Conference in June, with the shortlist announced in April.
http://poets.ca/contests-awards/raymond-souster/

The Gerald Lampert Memorial Award is given in the memory of Gerald Lampert, an arts administrator who organized authors’ tours and took a particular interest in the work of new writers. The award recognizes the best first book of poetry published by a Canadian in the preceding year. The Award carries a prize of $1,000 and is sponsored by the League of Canadian Poets. It is presented each year at the League’s Annual General Meeting in May or June, with the shortlist announced in April.
http://poets.ca/contests-awards/gerald-lampert/

...

Today's book of poetry:
Incarnate.  Juleta Severson-Baker.  Frontenac House Press.  Calgary, Alberta.  2013.



Juleta Severson-Baker takes a broad swat at lust in the pages of Incarnate.

Down Will I Lie

I want to be wracked like driftwood
I want wave after wave of you to lick me
lift me in your briney mouth
swish and strip and
spit me out

Reach for me

Always
and please and again
without ceasing
reach for me

...

There is a brevity to Severson-Baker's longing, a straight to the point edge - but these poems are not harsh.

Avalanche Zone

Nearing the top of the chairlift the wind is most severe.
My gloves up to cut the shear between goggles and
cheeks — a helicopter enters from off right, crosses
the mottled sky, same sky I dangle in, apparatus
humming me up mountain, insecting westward,
a metal flight towards the avalanche slope.  I make
the top, skis kissing grooves of snow, thighs and
shoulders coordinating to push off and slide
down a little rise to where four of us in our costumes
pose very still, looking up and to the left.
There's people up there, someone says and three black
dots move and become suddenly human.  Eyes can't
fathom distance in this enormity of granite and white.
The helicopter lowers, slows, shakes loose some snow,
a widening puff in the whumpwhump wind of its blades,
ascends, wobbles, turns and falls out of sight just the
other side of the peak.  The dots scramble with what
seems unreasonable speed over the black line and beyond
knowing.  Just then I feel an egg drop loose from the ovary
on my right side, freestyling towards the powder of my womb.
I hold frozen for one slow inhale before turning, poling,
searing a long straight line down the cold blue bowl,
two solo minutes, to the bottom.

...

What these poems are - is clear.  Blue sky and endless horizon clear.  Which is something I appreciate.  These poems are full of life, full of possibility and full of hope, within reason.

Sometimes;  from the edge of a city

The shine and pulse of the airport becomes beautiful
when we're alone.  Not yet on a plane, electronic ticket
hiding on my new phone, walking down the wide bazaar
of commerce, huge wall of glass to my left, and beyond —
tubes of air-people rolling close.  All the engine and lift
of my life in a bolus of truth closed up, sealed.
Black phone in my hand.  Threads of people I'd once
loved trailing the waxed floor behind me.

As in a dream the thin man, so young he mightn't
have been twenty, slid into my hoop of space —
this boy-man, neatly dressed and with pretty white
fingers and a hat, came upon me from the right and took
my hand, released my phone.  Like that I loved him.
He did not meet my eyes, was working my touch
screen and yes, I needed his help.  We moved
somehow to a table and he was putting the magic
of the age and his lovely lovely touch into my
grateful phone and with something like horror growing
I knew he was not going to stay.  I asked him where
he was from, Edson.  The ordinary dirt in the word,
the way he spoke it, it would be the last time.  Montreal
he said, and my chance was slipping by.  He was making
music play from my phone and colours lean and I wanted
to gift him, needed to keep him here, so I offered with
the red of my cheek and my forty-year old voice
a life like mine.  He saw it, full and possible and already
starting;  he would only have to smile and stay, but
from across the lurch of the cafe table he shook
his empyrean head, and faded to gone.
Sometimes the edge of a life is all we have.

...

The sensuality that shaped all these poems is not without humour.  Incarnate doesn't pull back from pointing fingers or tongue cheeking.

Rabbits

You hold a pelt
and your mind revolts
at a death as soft as god allows

Still, you'd take a hundred pelts
and make a coat

             (and wear it naked, fur side in)

...

Juleta Severson-Baker is a romantic and realist.  The best of these poems have an intimacy beyond what is usually shared on paper and Severson-Baker has her eyes wide open in the dark.

His Gentleness With Her

Heel of his hand along her collar bone,
his voice with a soft edge, the curve
of her ear burning.  She feels the strength
across his back, contained, controlled.
Her role is the clumsy child falling
from monkeybars;  every bone in her body
softer than clover.  When it is over
he kisses her forehead once, twice,
slow, so she will know his gentleness
is a choice.

...

Whenever Severson-Baker decides to step on the gas, her fearless wit pops up and lashes out.  But the bigger accomplishment is when she turns her pen to joy...

Between Us

Bees in our bed,
their restless feet
where my hip fits,
your ribs bristled by
the fuzz of their backs.

Closer
harvesting the whole length
of one another's skin
and smell, the bees release
their hum and honey.

An entire season
surrenders with
the burst of our shudders,
and the bees hover
only wings between us.

...

Juleta Severson-Baker is able to capture joy in a real tangible way, and that is tremendously hard in this fractured world.

Birds So White

I believe that pain can reach completion.
     ~Sena Jeter Naslund, from "The Disobedience of Water"

Somewhere, my friend, on a green lake
a white swan has left her nest and is paused,
perfectly, as if for a photograph.  The lake water
is a mirror;  two swans it seems, in the middle
of a lake, at the edge of a deep, quiet wood.
Though there is no photographer, no one at all,
thought I know you are not there to see her,
take heart in this knowing;  somewhere
a great beauty floats in silence, serene.
Somewhere the tears have already fallen
and the air is so clean, the birds so white.

...

Juleta Severson-Baker is no young naif.  These poems are full-on life experience passion, with warts whistles and bells.  Severson-Baker is brave enough to be honest and writes well enough to be poignant.

This last poem is a killer.  It's a novel wrapped up in a shortish poem.  I think it is brilliant.

Cord

In Bristol in 1776 ropemakers worked near the muddy
shipyards hard every day grey winter or summer grey day after
day pacing lengths of the ropeshed twining hemp or burlap
rough and heavy turning and twisting the fibres layering anchor
cables into heavy existence.  These men might have sang or
jeered while working but I think by noon they'd have fallen
silent a hard labour bulging forth from their corded hands
shouldering the finest rope in England.  See their skin scratched
and layered torn in the early months of their apprenticeships
ships in docks waiting for rigging ropes hawsers cables lines
there were American colonies to be put down victory over the
French to protect these men toughened their skin for King and
country muscles rivaling the strength of finished rope six inches
thick and skin so tough it tore no more.

Their women had to tougher too.  Ropemakers' hands couldn't
feel softness in breast or thigh at night they became all lips and
cock unwinding their women fraying untwining to expose a
fragile first thread at the core.  By day finger and thumbing the
thickening rope but thinking of that cotton tie at the neck of her
nightclothes beneath it the pulse purple in candlelight of a tiny
cord in her neck feeling it beneath his lips then that quick burst
of freedom unroped undone before the sure short oblivion of
sleep.

...




Juleta Severson-Baker, Incarnate


FROM THE BACK COVER

Incarnate is a brilliant collection of poems that capture the tension between the quotidian and the miraculous - "the hiccups-of-magic in the world" - recognizing that the two inform every moment of the day.  Both intimate and wide ranging, sensuous and spiritual, sorrowful and ecstatically joyful, these poems celebrate everything that is human, and blend observation with secure craftsmanship.  Juleta Severson-Baker observes the world with love and precision, and through her vision, enlarges our own. This is a book to be grateful for.
     Rosemary Greibel

The sensuality of Juleta's poems is obvious in the first word.  That's not easy to do: make words feel like moving lips.  And the pleasure of them will be clear, too, when someone, feeling these poems, will not be content with an empty room, and say them out loud.  I've known the mourning in this book, and now I know that the words for that loss were waiting here all along.  What delights me most, though, in reading all these poems together is the way they teach us that everything in life waits for the language to make it more than real.  Metaphor erupts in these poems, most evidently in the surreal "Leaving," but once you see it in one or two poems, you see it in all of Juleta's poetry.  Poetry is the most that can be wrung from language, and the most vivid images in it are the one that were never seen until made incarnate in art.
     Richard Harrison



frontenachouse.com

Thursday, April 17, 2014

MEETING THE TORMENTORS IN SAFEWAY - Alexandra Oliver (Biblioasis) - 2014 Pat Lowther Memorial Award Nominee

For the month of April this blog will be looking at the nominees for the 2014 Pat Lowther Memorial Award, Raymond Souster Award and the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award as recognized by the the League of Canadian Poets.

The Pat Lowther Memorial Award is given for a book of poetry by a Canadian woman published in the preceding year, and is in memory of the late Pat Lowther, whose career was cut short by her untimely death in 1975. The award carries a $1,000 prize. It is presented each year at the League’s Annual General Meeting in May or June, with the shortlist announced in April.
http://poets.ca/contests-awards/pat-lowther/

The Raymond Souster Award is given for a book of poetry by a League of Canadian Poets member (all levels, dues paid) published in the preceding year. The award honours Raymond Souster, an early founder of the League of Canadian Poets. The award carries a $1,000 prize. It is presented each year at the LCP Annual Poetry Festival and Conference in June, with the shortlist announced in April.
http://poets.ca/contests-awards/raymond-souster/

The Gerald Lampert Memorial Award is given in the memory of Gerald Lampert, an arts administrator who organized authors’ tours and took a particular interest in the work of new writers. The award recognizes the best first book of poetry published by a Canadian in the preceding year. The Award carries a prize of $1,000 and is sponsored by the League of Canadian Poets. It is presented each year at the League’s Annual General Meeting in May or June, with the shortlist announced in April.
http://poets.ca/contests-awards/gerald-lampert/

...

Today's book of poetry:
Meeting the Tormentors in Safeway.  Alexandra Oliver.  Biblioasis.  Windsor, Ontario.  2013.



Formalism is not the ground I usually walk, so how do I explain my complete fascination with the poetry of Alexandra Oliver?  These very structured poems are in disguise, it is a trick of the cleverest kind.  Oliver  is speaking plainly enough to us even though she has ornamented her stories within the framework of very traditional formal rhyming schemes.  It is mostly invisible magic because these poems read with the casual tone of free verse.  That is a huge compliment.

The Promise We Made
To The Earthquake

I'm going to turn my back on death, forsaking
fatalistic anomie.  I'll forge
a human heart from rogue tectonic plates,
a way to make the flocks of birds return.
I'll wait until the church has ceased to burn,
the arms to pull away from iron gates,
rebel against geology in rage.
I swear I'll do it when my hands stop shaking.

I'm going to turn the world back by a day,
raise stone wall and conjure panes of glass
from mournful piles of sand and broken streets.
I'll tell my neighbour what he means to me,
give back his toaster, skis, and new TV.
I'll make the rude wind raise tarpaulin sheets
and let them part until the children pass
to parents resurrected from the clay.

I'm turning over fifty-two new leaves.
I'm going to speak with kindness to my wife
and tell my baser thoughts to disappear.
I will not steal my brother's medications,
fake illness at my in-laws' celebrations,
or make my office intern weep in fear.
I fell apart so I could make my life
a binding deal within a den of thieves.

I swear to you that, when the ground stops shaking,
I'll put this day behind me like a dream.
I'll step out with my ordinary hands,
clear lumber and lay bricks for twenty years,
re-irrigate the gardens with my tears,
endeavour to be one who understands
how our own better angels can redeem
a country from the hell of earth's own making.

...

Alexandra Oliver is seriously funny when that is what she is striving for.  These poems are precisely weighted and measured but the reader never feels that as a burden.  I'm pretty sure Oliver can hit any target she aims at, she is assassin clever and precise as a clock.

Rimsky-Korsakov
On Fifth Avenue

Today's there's a boy in the bookshop cafe
In frock coat and black satin vest
And a hat and a cane and a silver pince-nez
And a pocked watch tucked in his breast.

He tells me he's Russian and likes to compose
(Folk opera's big in demand),
And he somehow seems more than a loon in old clothes,
So I reach for his thin, offered hand.

I wonder what colours the life that he leads;
(How often are people unkind?
Does some other age give all that he needs?)
I follow him now, in my mind:

I picture him later, on one of the trains—
The passengers goggle with groans,
Make fingertip squiggles right next to their brains,
Nudge neighbours, take pictures with phones.

His family waits by the small garden wall
On the coldest of cold Jersey nights,
And nothing is Russian here, nothing at all,
But he is the brightest of lights.

Though not quite what Bubba describes as a mensch,
Such love is a fixed guarantee,
As they listen for scrapes of the Schweighofer's bench
And wait for the flight of the bee.

...

These poems are a lesson in classical poetry writ large and modern.  Meeting the Tormentors in Safeway is a towering accomplishment.  Oliver would describe  her poems as "text-based home movies" and they are - but honed through a very particular lens, shot back onto the screen and made real through Oliver's pyrotechnical mastery of form.  Oliver writes as though wit were her middle name and eloquence something she was born to.

Meeting the Tormentors
in Safeway

They all had names like Jennifer or Lynne
or Katherine; they all had bone-blonde hair,
that wet, flat cut with bangs.  They pulled your chair
from underneath you, shoved their small fists in
your face.  Too soon, you knew it would begin,
those minkish teeth like shrapnel in the air,
the Bacchic taunts, the Herculean dare,
their soccer cleats against your porcine shin,
that laugh, which sounded like a hundred birds
escaping from a gunshot through the reeds—
and now you have to face it all again:
the joyful freckled faces lost for words
in supermarkets, as those red hands squeeze
your own.  It's been so long!  They say.  Amen.

...

The surprise for me is how much I thoroughly enjoyed Alexandra Oliver's Meeting the Tormentors in Safeway.  This is strong, deliberate writing that pulls you into its' orbit immediately and holds the reader in its' own particular gravity, the embrace is enchanting.

...


Alexandra Oliver was born in Vancouver, BC.  Her work has received nominations for the Pushcart Prize and a CBC Literary Award in Poetry. The author of one previous book, Where the English Housewife Shines (Tin Press, London, UK 2007), Oliver co-edits The Rotary Dial, a journal of formalist poetry based in Toronto.  She teaches in the Stonecoast M.F.A. Program at the University of Southern Maine.



Alexandra Oliver - Launch of Meeting the Tormentors in Safeway, Toronto




SlamNation Bonus Poem:  Alexandra Oliver


FROM THE BACK COVER:

"Alexandra Oliver has many arrows in her quiver—all of the sharpened to a fine point.  This is an excellent and entertaining collection."
     Timothy Steele

"Alexandra Oliver is in full command of a saber wit and impeccable ear.  Lucky the reader along for the ride."
     Jeanne Marie Beaumont



biblioasis.com