Download or read book Wavelengths of Your Song written by Eleonore Schönmaier and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 2013-04-01 with total page 190 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At night we swim / following the fence: / diverted / we enter the net / shaped like a heart / and in the heart the hook / guides us to the back A stunning unfolding of memory, Wavelengths of Your Song juxtaposes a childhood in the northern Canadian wilderness with the adventures of an international creative life. Genuine environmentalism is at the heart of this collection. Migrations of birds and humans lend their songs to the vivid writing and a tangible, sensory reality emerges from their sounds. Music by Beethoven and Rzewski, paintings by Norval Morrisseau and Kandinsky, and writing by Kafka and Celan, inspire Eleonore Schönmaier's poetry. She takes the reader on unexpected journeys skiing across frozen lakes, cycling along Dutch canals, or hiking in Malta and New Zealand. With surprising, at times breathtaking connections, she illuminates hot air ballooning, canoe camping, planting trees on Vienna rooftops, and the bathing of a black horse in the North Sea. In poems that travel extensively around the globe, in lists for living well, and in love letters, Eleonore Schönmaier takes the reader on a journey along the wavelengths of the ocean, sound, and the physics of light.
Download or read book Wavelengths of your song written by Eleonore Schönmaier and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Rags of Night in Our Mouths written by Margo Wheaton and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 2022-04-05 with total page 86 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Silence in the belly of the breathing house. Night so deep / it’s reaching through rooms as if searching its pockets. Standing in the midst of her childhood home, Margo Wheaton was struck by two things: the extent of the damage caused by her father’s and stepmother’s alcoholism and the life force that pulsed in the once-vibrant rooms and yard – in the abandoned trees, neglected flowerbeds, and gardens her parents had planted and tended for decades. Radiant, grieving, and intensely musical, Rags of Night in Our Mouths is an exploration of human and environmental states of precarity and vulnerability. In the opening suite, Wheaton draws upon her family’s deep roots in the Tantramar Marsh area and constructs a hallucinatory world of fragility, chaos, and searing natural beauty as she writes her own version of Maritime gothic. Employing a variation of the ghazal, a historically Persian form popularized in Canada by the late New Brunswick–based poet John Thompson, she surveys the ruins of her working-class childhood home, a thriving place now ravaged by generational alcoholism and despair. Directed at first toward an absent beloved – a convention of the ghazal tradition – the focus moves in the second suite to the teeming, non-human world of an endangered saltmarsh on a wild shore of the Northumberland Strait bordering Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Prince Edward Island. In the book’s closing suite, Wheaton honours a landscape slated to be destroyed and pays homage to “the broken-hearted, the bereaved” who walk the ragged shoreline, struggling to make sense of losses and death. Meditative and beautifully crafted, Rags of Night in Our Mouths calls us to engage passionately with our suffering world.
Download or read book A House in Memory written by David Helwig and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 2020-07-23 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "the language of the waterway / the name / the train's route through bliss / to" When the poet and novelist David Helwig - a recipient of the Matt Cohen Prize for lifetime achievement and a member of the Order of Canada - died in October 2018, he left behind a substantial catalogue of unpublished work. A House in Memory, a selection of Helwig's last poems, was assembled by his daughter, Maggie. It shows an author still at the height of his powers, creating work in complex formal structures, contemplating mortality, memory, and the landscape of his adopted home of Prince Edward Island, and paying tribute to his literary predecessors. The collection also includes unpublished poems from earlier in Helwig's career. Ranging widely through time, space, and literary tradition, A House in Memory features some deeply personal poems. As Maggie Helwig says of her father, "he could not cease to be a poet as long as he had breath in this world.
Download or read book A Different Wolf written by Deborah-Anne Tunney and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 2020-06-02 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In her debut poetry collection, Deborah-Anne Tunney delves into the life and work of one of the twentieth century's most influential film directors, Alfred Hitchcock. Just as Hitchcock's work looks unflinchingly at some of the darkest elements of human nature, A Different Wolf turns a lens on the director himself, revealing the interplay between the social mores of his time and Hitchcock's distinctive psychological makeup. A Different Wolf views the iconic director's cinematic masterpieces through the optics of the poet's personal quest for meaning. Tunney reveals how guilt and innocence, universal and timeless subjects, work to define character and motivate plot. Other poems illustrate Hitchcock's presentation of women as a sign of his fixations, but also as a product of his era. His desire to expose the qualities of time - how film can slow it down or speed it up, qualities he considered filmmaking's most important tool - points to the deep resonance of his work. Providing a sharp-eyed analysis of Hitchcock's life and art, A Different Wolf offers a unique take on the filmmaker's enduring relevance.
Download or read book Where We Live written by John Reibetanz and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 2016-04-01 with total page 115 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: shell in the night sky / and whose anti-clockwise spiral / repeats the Milky Way’s unwinding / informed not with the lore of clocks or teachers / but of gods and children Where We Live explores how specific places and their features (street scenes, classrooms, furniture, creatures both real and mythical) become part of our identities, and illustrates how we carry them around and how we are shaped by their outlines even as we, in turn, transform them. This reciprocity extends to the adoption of other voices in the translated poems that are a vital part of each section, and to the active participation of the reader invited by the collection’s flexible use of poetic form. John Reibetanz’s approach comes from a conviction that the most compelling and significant features of human identity are not primarily found in solitude but rather evolve through our conversations with otherness. This collection works as a kind of long poem, its three parts interconnected, each presenting a particular interpretation of the process of possession, loss, and recovery. “Thresholds” deals with encounters between the self and the other – childhood experiences, family, familiar places – and seeks ways of transcending the disappointment within such sources. “Roommates” explores both the uniqueness and the reciprocity in human relationships with the natural world, and “Flyways” posits that there is no separation between the human/natural and the imaginative: however far-flung, they all interweave and constitute the territory where we live.
Download or read book The Unlit Path Behind the House written by Margo Wheaton and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 2016-04-01 with total page 107 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The day’s an old room / stripped of its furniture; there are / never enough beds in winter. / By late afternoon, the shadows / are forming a blue inconsolable hall // as sparrows retreat to makeshift / cots of pine bark and eaves. // Even the parched marsh grass / has stilled, every blade / become an ear. Sensuous, atmospheric, and spare, The Unlit Path Behind the House collects poems that seek light in difficult places. In lines filled with an intense music, Margo Wheaton listens for the lyricism inside the day’s blessings and catastrophes. Wheaton’s poems sing at the intersections where public and private worlds collide: the steady cadence of a boy carrying an unconscious girl in his arms, the afternoon journey of a woman taking books to prisoners, the rhythmic breathing of a homeless man asleep in a parking lot. In these works, fireflies pulse in the dark, lovers clasp and unclasp, and street signs sing like Blake’s angels. Deeply informed by the natural world, Wheaton’s writing is marked by great meditative depth; while passionately engaged, these poems evoke a field of mystery and stillness. Whether exploring themes of isolation, spiritual dispossession, desire, or the sanctity of daily rituals, The Unlit Path Behind the House conveys our longing for home and the different ways we try to find it.
Download or read book Ripping down half the trees written by Evan J and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 2021-06-01 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Some poems can live without souls / but mine remain ghastly fools flicking / uncomfortable narratives like / cigarette butts during class change. One out of every twenty students in the adult education classes Evan J teaches in Sioux Lookout, Ontario, dies every year; the surviving students are often afflicted by severe racism, poverty, addictions, and violence. Ripping down half the trees engages with these struggles, offering a catalogue of experiences specific to the remote regions of Canada. Tearing down the façade of Canadian justice and equality to expose the racism, colonialism, sexism, prejudicial capitalism, and ableism at the nation's core, these are poems about cruelty, both the obvious and the ambient. They are unflinching in their sociopolitical criticism, upset by unchanging systemic oppressions, unable to overlook the threat of the author's white skin, unwilling to forget Justin Trudeau in blackface. And while they acknowledge the limits of the author's privileged perspective, they are never willing to let the perpetrating structures of this cruelty go unchecked. But these poems also let stand the shelterwood, the upstanding actions of individuals, the totems of hope. They work as coping strategies, as therapy, as empathy, offering a glimpse of optimism and a space for discourse. These are poems that listen.
Download or read book Dust Blown Side of the Journey written by Eleonore Schönmaier and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 2017-04-11 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At times apocalyptic and other times passionate and intimate, Eleonore Schönmaier’s poems show the beauty of the lived and natural world in both wilderness and urban settings. A woman hides her love letters in beehives, a cherry tree in full blossom is transported horizontally on a bike, and three crows tap their beaks on a metal door. A grandmother gestures how birds once flew in blue skies, public smiles are outlawed, and a shot-down jet lands in a field of wildflowers. Men from warm countries wear big coats and are falsely suspected of hiding bombs, an Indigenous man is forced by police into the trunk of a car, and a stork lands in prison under charges of espionage. In Canada, the northern village of Paradise is under evacuation orders, and in Europe Desmond Tutu steps down from a podium into a crowd of photographers. Over a Belgian lunch Frederic Rzewski talks about his piano concerto A Dog’s Life, and a Dutch dinner is shared with a young refugee boy who laughs joyously. Reflecting a childhood in the northern Canadian boreal forest, combined with an adult life lived without borders, Eleonore Schönmaier’s vivid and sensual language invites the reader to fully join in and enjoy the journey.
Download or read book Some Dance written by Ricardo Sternberg and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 2014-02-13 with total page 75 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "To be able to pry apart: / this is object, this is subject / even though (confusion begins) / he can be both. Difficult then / to stand at the mirror and reflect: / I am this. This is what I am." Some Dance is a meditation on stories, the intersection of stories, of things made up, of things imagined, and of things lived - perhaps. Tricks played by memory, scrambling events from life with fiction, are a constant. Ricardo Sternberg seeks a fixed point from which to understand the world, but finds no resolution save for another poem. Everything is in flux, unstable, and leads to unexpected places: a commune in the 1960s, a drunken doctor who deals in contraband, a palm reader, a classroom visited by Jesus, a dance in a darkened kitchen. A lively collection that turns towards the commonplace, classical, and strange, Some Dance masterfully balances serious thought, big ideas, and good humour through surprising, elegant, and colloquial expressions.
Download or read book Check written by Sarah Tolmie and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 2020-12-17 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hairless apes, while they're alive / Need a community to thrive. / Bald fact. Hard-won freedoms of choice and association lead us to flock together in groups of the like-minded. Check is a book of contemporary poetic satire about the groups that we inevitably form and their consequences: in-groups and out-groups and mutual suspicion. When we look around at others, and talk about them amongst ourselves, we agree. Sarah Tolmie writes about parents and teenagers, social media users, different kinds of writers, university professors, feminists, celebrities, pundits -- each one in possession of a different truth and determined to defend it. Hatred and intolerance are always the province of other people, never ourselves. Check begins and ends with the premise that toleration is exceedingly difficult and exasperating; it should not be casually assumed, and failures in it are universal. There has never been a tolerant society before, certainly not a global one.
Download or read book Nuclear Family written by Jean Van Loon and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 2022-04-15 with total page 143 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the night her whitened toes / cold sole on his calf / between his palms he warms / a slender foot – / twig bones, taut skin. Jean Van Loon’s father was a metallurgist in an Ottawa lab that contributed to the Manhattan Project. The Geiger counter he brought home exposed her mother’s dinner plate as radioactive. Her childhood friend’s father sold cobalt bombs to the Soviet Union. Unbeknownst even to the family, her mother worked for Canada’s Cold War intelligence service. Rooted in memory and history, Nuclear Family carries the reader into the sense of impending nuclear doom and the explosions of material wealth that shaped Van Loon’s childhood. Poems come alive with image, sound, and texture, portraying the innocence of childhood games, the worldwide effects of prolonged nuclear testing, and the long-lasting legacy of her father’s suicide – a fallout of radioactive silences. In Nuclear Family violent events, both global and familial, permeate a girl’s coming of age in a story of cataclysm and, ultimately, recovery.
Download or read book Translating Air written by Kath MacLean and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 2018-09-28 with total page 96 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The hunt over; the kill complete / limping towards perfection, padding / about the room, thorns in her thumbs / Hermes crawling on all fours – / That was the last I saw of Hilda. What is it to remember a life, to relive it, to mythologize it? Things that were said or not said haunt us for a lifetime. In Translating Air Kath MacLean imagines conversations between the modernist poet H.D. and Sigmund Freud during the poet's sessions with him in 1933 to 1934 and the dialogues that continued long afterwards in H.D.'s own mind. Shadowed by uncertainty and memory lapses or blinded by flashes of profound truth, readers are transported to a world of myth, continuity, and human connection. H.D.'s palimpsest account of herself as girl and woman, writer and Imagist, and psychic and spiritualist is engaging and elastic as it pulls readers into a space where time is both endless and sure. Questioning her sanity and a world gone mad with war, H.D.'s personal accounts help us understand what it means to love deeply, to feel passionately, and to think beyond the limits of our individual consciousness. MacLean demystifies and humanizes one of the most misunderstood modernist writers in this stunning collection. Translating Air takes us on a remarkable journey into the known and unknown and allows readers to experience one remarkable woman's struggle to get it right, to live life with dignity, hope, wisdom, and the courage to have no regrets.
Download or read book Field Guide to the Lost Flower of Crete written by Eleonore Schönmaier and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 2021-06-01 with total page 123 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Thyme clings, high / and away from the grazing and scents / the air. Island reality is interconnected with live-retrieved memories in which a nurse follows a violent patient into the northern Canadian bush, a migrant mother faces her new job as the village butcher, an Ojibway man is forced to walk a dangerous route home alone, teenagers loot the local dump to build their mother's wheelchair, and an electrician watches a woman play a grand piano on a ballfield. A (re)creation of the surreality and altered time within deep states of grieving, Field Guide to the Lost Flower of Crete juxtaposes sorrow with fragmentary unapologetic joy. Eleonore Schönmaier forges compelling symphonic resonances between European musical encounters and a northern working-class childhood. By centring her experiential empathy on a history of racism and poverty, she guides us into better ways of being. Intimate reflections are contrasted with geopolitical and environmental concerns as Schönmaier's fierce intelligence focuses on what is most essential in our lives. The arc of this collection offers a rejuvenating meditation on the meaning of loss and love, highlighted by the lyric beauty of the writing.
Download or read book Small Fires written by Kelly Norah Drukker and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 2016-08-01 with total page 115 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We come / to kneel at the doorway, / to peer into that kind of / dark. To think our way / backwards, listening. Tracing a series of journeys, real and imagined, Kelly Norah Drukker’s Small Fires opens with a section of poems set on Inis Mór, a remote, Irish-speaking island off the west coast of County Galway, where the poet-as-speaker discovers the ways in which remnants of the island’s early Christian monastic culture brush up against island life in the twenty-first century. Also present is a series of poems set in the Midi-Pyrénées and in the countryside around Lyon. Linked to the shorter poems in the collection by landscape, theme, and tone is a set of longer narrative poems that give voice to imagined speakers who are, each in a different way, living on the margins. The first describes a young emigrant woman’s crossing from Ireland to Canada in the early twentieth century, where she must sacrifice her tie to the land for the uncertain freedom of a journey by sea, while a second depicts the lives of silk workers living under oppressive conditions in Lyon in the 1830s. In detailed and musical language, the poems in Small Fires highlight aspects of landscape and culture in regions that are haunted by marginal and silenced histories. The collection concludes with a long poem written as a response to American writer Paul Monette’s autobiographical work Borrowed Time: An AIDS Memoir.
Download or read book Unbound written by Gabrielle McIntire and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 2021-07-15 with total page 82 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: inside sadness is glory / if you see it right way round, / find the seam, reverse it to perspectivize, / unwind light, joy's unravelling spool Inspired by mystical traditions, birdwatching, tree planting, ethics, neuropsychology, and quantum physics, Gabrielle McIntire's poems draw us in with their passionate attention to what it means to be human in a still-wondrous natural environment. Touching on human frailty, the eternal, and the ecological with a delicate and evocative brush, Unbound enacts an almost prayerful attentiveness to the earth's creatures and landscapes while it offers both mournful and humorous treatments of love and loss. McIntire's finely tuned musical voice – with its incantatory rhythms, rhymes, sound play, and entrancing double meanings – invites us to be courageously open to the unexpected. Unbound stirs us to re-evaluate our place amidst the astonishing beauty and wisdom of an Earth facing the early stages of climate change.
Download or read book The Art of Dying written by Sarah Tolmie and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 2018-02-02 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hate to tell you, but you're going to die. / Quite soon. Me, too. / Shuck off the wisdom while it's warm. / Death does no harm / To wisdom. Sarah Tolmie's second collection of poems is a traditional ars moriendi, a how-to book on the practices of dying. Confronting the fear of death head-on, and describing the rituals that mitigate it, the poems in The Art of Dying take a satirical look at the ways we explain, enshrine, and, above all, evade death in contemporary culture. Some poems are personal – a parent tries to explain to a child why a grandfather is in hospital, or stages a funeral for a child's imaginary friend – while others comment on how death figures in the news, on TV, and in social media. Some poems ask if there is any place left for poets in our rituals of memory and commemoration. A few examine the apocalyptic language of climate change. Others poke fun at the death-defying claims of posthumanism. A thoughtful and irreverent collection about serious concerns, The Art of Dying begins and ends with the fact of death, and strips away our euphemisms about it.
