Poetry In Transit 2018/19
Created by ABPBC on November 23, 2018
The Dance Floor Tilts
As the dance floor of life tilts beneath our feet, do we keep dancing? In this inspired collection of Susan Alexander’s poems, we sway to the rhythms of passion, death, grief, and how we are connected in our lives. The individual moments making up the tune of this poet’s life offer the possibility of finding the beauty within the everyday resonance of our own existence.
From “Grief”
That was the winter the tide rose
so high the house and cedars
went underwater. The little light left
was green. It was hard to move,
every step a push against sea water.
When I climbed into the car
to drive to higher ground
the steering wheel was gone,
an octopus in its place.
I couldn’t see out
the window for tentacles.
From “Moon Over Mathews Range, Kenya”
O in this life bless us with the camel’s foot and eye.
May we walk over the shifting surface of things
and not sink. The long lashes and that clear inner eyelid
to protect our sight yet let in light to see.
Some End / West Broadway
A masterpiece of late style and friendship, this volume combines back to back two powerful new works by old masters, George Bowering and George Stanley.
Stanley's West Broadway is a long poem, composed over the past decade, following on Stanley's other long city poems, "San Francisco's Gone," "Terrace Landscapes," and Vancouver: A Poem. Like those poems, West Broadway has embedded in it shorter verse poems that stand on their own.
"West Broadway is a narrative/lyrical work, set along the West Br …
Elemental
Usually, we take for granted or plain ignore the Earth we walk on, the Sky above, the Water we drink and bathe in or that falls as rain, the Fire we assume for heat, and the Wood that makes up our landscape and building materials. But over fifteen years as a construction carpenter, Kate Braid began to pay more attention to the materials she worked with and depended upon. Out of these she has crafted an intimate picture of what it is like to be wholly engaged with the elemental materials of earth …
Short Histories of Light
Shiver. Swift whip of wind. / Fangs of the low front / stinging fierce as forest fires. / Frost thickening the stoop. In his debut collection, Short Histories of Light, Aidan Chafe recounts his Catholic upbringing in a household dealing with the common but too often taboo subject of mental illness. In unflinching fashion, Chafe reveals the unintended disasters that follow those who struggle with depression and the frustration of loved ones left to pick up the pieces. Other sections of the book s …
Refugium
New poetry written by prize-winning BC poets, musicians, and artists such as Bruce Cockburn, Brian Brett and Lorna Crozier, anthologized by Victoria's city poet-laureate. While in the world of politics there are still climate change deniers, the poets watch the warming seas, the dying birds slicked in oil, the whales, the jellies, the sea otters and the octopus. They stand, as close to the shore as possible, watch the slow turning tide. In this collection of poems from the coast of B.C., Califor …
Sustenance
Writers from BC and Beyond on the Subject of Food will bring to the table some of Canada's best contemporary writers, celebrating all that is unique about Vancouver's literary and culinary scene. Punctuated by beautiful local food photographs, interviews with and recipes from some of our top local chefs, each of these short pieces will shock, comfort, praise, entice, or invite reconciliation, all while illuminating our living history through the lens of food. Sustenance is also a community respo …
Otolith
Winner, 2018 League of Canadian Poets Gerald Lampert Memorial Award
Longlisted, 2018 League of Canadian Poets Pat Lowther Memorial Award
Otolith — the ear stone — is a series of bones that help us to orient ourselves in space. In Otolith, Emily Nilsen attempts a similar feat in poetry: to turn the reader's attention to their relationship to the world, revealing an intertidal state between the rootedness of place and the uncertainty and tenuousness of human connection. Born in the fecundity of …
The Girls with Stone Faces
A long poem memorializing the art and lives of sculptors Frances Loring and Florence Wyle.
Arleen Paré, in her first book-length poem after her Governor General Literary Award?winning Lake of Two Mountains, turns her cool, benevolent eye to the shared lives of Florence Wyle and Frances Loring, two of Canada's greatest artists, whose sculptures she comes face to face with at the National Gallery of Canada. In the guise of a curator, Paré takes us on a moving, carefully structured tour through th …
