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 What Really Matters written by Thomas O'Grady and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 2000 with total page 120 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Thanksgiving Summers we'd give thanks to be city born and bred when, come mid-August, our country cousins trudged two weeks ahead to the stern task of learning, the clean-cut drudgery of school. Of course, in October we'd curse the luck that gave them a fortnight repeal of break-knuckle rules -- though what could be worse than digging potatoes in muck-caked fields? Who, in their right minds, would envy that chore, and pray -- in late November, a thousand miles and many years away -- to restore themselves by the grace of clay-coated hands? Elbow-deep in a sack of unscrubbed spuds, we swear never to wash off that red mud. Home resonates in this collection. Heart longs for the Prince Edward Island birthplace left behind, memory building like early frost on fresh laundry. But there is another sense of home for this poet of the Irish diaspora, deep down in legacies of poetry and family lore, bred-in-the-bone, read in the signs of sea and sky. For O'Grady, the poet is charged with turning and returning to such legacies of place and time -- with celebrating what really matters. Throughout this dynamic collection, powered by an imagination that gains momentum like a bicycle running downhill, and pressured by exquisitely turned phrase and rhyme, O'Grady maintains an exhilarating grip on language and landscape, on the wondrous details of poetry, place, and home.
Download or read book Franklin s Passage written by David Solway and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 2003-11-03 with total page 96 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Based upon the various conflicting accounts of John Franklin's calamitous attempt to complete and map the Northwest Passage, Franklin's Passage takes as its starting point a series of rhetorical questions posed by Henry David Thoreau in Walden: Is not our own interior white on the chart? Is it a North-West passage around this continent, that we would find? Are these the problems which most concern mankind? Is Franklin the only man who is lost? David Solway explores the concepts of narrative, parable, and allegory, treating the failed Expedition as an unfolding text in which the human adventure is subsumed and recorded, introducing the Expedition as a mirror in which the soul may see itself.
Download or read book The Little Yellow House written by Heather Simeney MacLeod and published by McGill-Queen's University Press. This book was released on 2012-03-05 with total page 99 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "we, the living, collect the dead. / Fallen autumn leaves, crushed flowers between / the pages of books, photographs of moments / that can never be fully recovered or even / remembered" What have you forgotten and what have you lost? The Little Yellow House investigates recollection - searching for people and the objects that bind them to memory - to uncover the story or the small moment between people and things. Heather Simeney MacLeod explores masterpieces, biblical stories, scientific theories, notions of reincarnation, and engages them with the plain, the lucid, and yet vibrant characters that resound with significance and vigor. Her verse reveals the secrets we have always known but somehow misplaced, whispering, "And we waste, we squander / we misplace, we misremember, and we forget." Poised between incident and memory, MacLeod's poetry considers the stillness between reflection and forgetting. A spirited and remarkable collection, The Little Yellow House joins together everyday and extraordinary occasions to suggest that we remember and misremember more than we suppose.
Download or read book In the House Upon the Dirt Between the Lake and the Woods written by Matt Bell and published by Soho Press. This book was released on 2013 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A newly-wed couple escape a busy confusion of their homeland for a distant and almost uninhabited lakeshore. They plan to lead a simple life there, fishing the lake, trapping the nearby woods and building a house upon the dirt between where they can raise a family. But as their every pregnancy fails, the child-obsessed husband begins to rage at this new world: the song-spun objects somehow created by his wife's beautiful singing voice, the giant and sentient bear that rules the beasts of the woods... A powerful exploration of the limits of parenthood and marriage.
Download or read book Delivering the News written by Thomas O'Grady and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 2019-04-09 with total page 93 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: War, Pestilence, Famine, Death. Was I deaf / to the headline roar of my unwieldy load? Engaging with the inevitability of change and flux, Thomas O'Grady's poems grapple with themes of death and rebirth, of loss and resiliency, of ebb and flow within nature and within individual lives and romantic and domestic relationships. Bookended by the springtime of “Controlled Burn” and its mirror, the wistfully autumnal “Magritte,” the collection follows multiple arcs within and across poems and longer sequences. Part I, "Seeing Red," grounds the poems in the rural landscapes, shorescapes, and streetscapes of the poet's childhood on Prince Edward Island, leading O'Grady home as he returns to “the heartening blaze / of red that frames the doors, // the eaves, the corner trim / of every outlying / Island barn and shed.” Part II, “The Wide World,” comprises poems prompted by more cosmopolitan landscapes, both literal and figurative, and inspired by the graphic arts, jazz music, classical mythology, and other writers. A later sequence of eight poems reflects O'Grady's Irish heritage within the social fabric of PEI. Through precise and steadying language, Delivering the News reflects the capacity of poetry both to acknowledge and to mitigate life's mutability.
Download or read book The Night Chorus written by Harold Hoefle and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 2018-08-23 with total page 81 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A whistling through teeth. / He shuts his eyes but still sees / the red glow of exit signs. Harold Hoefle's The Night Chorus rises out of forests and country roads, bars and buses, cities and small towns. These locales are the haunts of outsiders ranging from travellers and farmers to a soldier, a drug addict, a refugee, and the murdered. The past clings in these stark, evocative poems, "memory a closet of clothes / that hang from bent wire." In the tradition of songwriters like Gordon Lightfoot and Gord Downie and poets such as Al Purdy, Karen Solie, and David O'Meara, The Night Chorus presents so-called "obscure" lives, where dark and playful humour collides with historic and mythic characters including Ovid and Dante, Odysseus and Desdemona. Using lyric poetry and the ghazal, the prose poem and the elegy, The Night Chorus brims with images as sharp as wild geese scrawling letters against an evening sky and as humble as "pots of plum dumplings and still-warm soup." Bookended by a sequence of lyrics inspired by cross-country road trips, Hoefle references iconic places like Black Dog Road and Seldom Seen and peoples the landscape with imagined characters. Their voices – damaged, rough, intimate – will echo in the reader's mind.
Download or read book Rules of the Kingdom written by Julie Paul and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 2017-02-01 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A lapsed religion still emits / faint signals; God, / in his satellite dish, / groans / moving on. To seek belonging, to strain against the familiar – these are the polarities many of us live between, feeling the pull of each desire. Offering a particular history, an intimate vantage point from within the various kingdoms we inhabit, Julie Paul’s The Rules of the Kingdom is an exploration of this struggle on a personal level and a universal one. Broken into five sections, the book examines the human struggle to find meaning, comfort, and a sense of home. In “Settlers’ Descendant Reclaims the Past,” the poems consider rural life, both the specific and the collective, including a village’s destruction by fire. In “Weight of the Word” the focus turns to family of origin, religion, and rites of passage. Poems take a familial tack again in “Cleavage,” wherein Paul dives into the waters of motherhood, and they drift into further intimacy in “The World’s Smallest Republic,” a series of poems about sex, love, and marriage. Finally, the poems in the fifth section, “Next Time the World Will Burn,” explore our place in the twenty-first century and offer some idiosyncratic suggestions on how to live. At turns humorous, playful, contemplative, and coy, the poems in The Rules of the Kingdom question the vagaries of faith and family but ultimately celebrate life and love.
Download or read book The Tantramar Re Vision written by Kevin Irie and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 2021-08-04 with total page 142 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: I've lived the way a field is sometimes / a shelter for mice / or sometimes a source of game / for a hawk Inspired by the literary landscape of the late poet John Thompson, Kevin Irie's The Tantramar Re-Vision presents a portrait of nature where the benign and the bedevilled coexist, collude, or collide. The Tantramar Re-Vision charts routes of discovery as it follows trails, waterways, flights, and fears, be it through the woods, the wilds, the page, or the mind where "it's hard to admit / you are not to your taste." It questions an existence in which the inhuman thrives, ignorant of divinity, while the human psyche continues to search for answers as "life takes directions / away from" it. The Tantramar Marsh setting of John Thompson's Stilt Jack resonates with Irie's landscapes of birds, fish, plants, and wildlife, all still within reach yet part of a world where "wind carries sounds / it cannot hear." Insightful and meditative, The Tantramar Re-Vision is poetry of the inner self and the outside observer, a poetic testament to the ways literature creates its own landmarks and nature survives without knowing a word.
Download or read book Vlarf written by Jason Camlot and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 2021-11-15 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Holmes entered the cabinet / of the respectable reverend / (who was in fact a closet naturalist) / and found so many Victorian things. In the early 2000s flarf poetry emerged as an avant-garde movement that generated disturbing and amusing texts from the results of odd internet searches. In Vlarf Jason Camlot plumbs the canon of Victorian literature, as one would search the internet, to fashion strange, sad, and funny forms and feelings in poetry. Vlarf pursues expressions of sentiment that may have become unfamiliar, unacceptable, or uncool since the advent of modernism by mining Victorian texts and generic forms with odd inclinations, using techniques that include erasure, bout-rimé, emulation, adaptation, reboot, mimicry, abhorrence, cringe, and love. Erasures of massive volumes of prose by John Stuart Mill and John Ruskin become concise poems of condensed sadness; a reboot of Christina Rossetti’s “Goblin Market” is told from the perspective of a ten-year-old boy with an imaginary albatross pal; recovered fragments from an apocryphal book of Victorian nonsense verse are pieced together; a Leonard Cohen song about Queen Victoria is offered in a steampunk rendering; and a meditative guinea pig delivers a dramatic monologue in the vein of Robert Browning. Camlot moves through Victorian literature as a collector in a curiosity shop, seeking the oddest forms of feeling in language to shape them into peculiarly affective poems.
Download or read book Slow War written by Benjamin Hertwig and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 2017-08-14 with total page 125 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Benjamin Hertwig's debut collection of poetry, Slow War, is at once an account of contemporary warfare and a personal journey of loss and the search for healing. It stands in the tradition of Wilfred Owen's "Dulce et Decorum Est" and Kevin Powers’s "Letter Composed During a Lull in the Fighting." A century after the First World War, Hertwig presents both the personal cost of war in poems such as "Somewhere in Flanders/Afghanistan" and "Food Habits of Coyotes, as Determined by Examination of Stomach Contents," and the potential for healing in unlikely places in "A Poem Is Not Guantánamo Bay." This collection provides no easy answers – Hertwig looks at the war in Afghanistan with the unflinching gaze of a soldier and the sustained attention of a poet. In his accounting of warfare and its difficult aftermath on the homefront, the personal becomes political. While these poems inhabit both experimental and traditional forms, the breakdown of language channels a descent into violence and an ascent into a future that no longer feels certain, where history and trauma are forever intertwined. Hertwig reminds us that remembering war is a political act and that writing about war is a way we remember.
Download or read book Grotesque Tenderness written by Daniel Cowper and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 2019-05-15 with total page 118 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Afraid to be alone / we met by lamplight, trading stories: // Sin of Man was one, // Age of Science, another. More // prayers than answers. Daniel Cowper's debut poetry collection, Grotesque Tenderness, speaks for an unrooted age, for unrooted people. In these poems, city-dwellers long to ally themselves with some sympathetic culture or the evolutionary logic of nature, but those alliances remain conditional, ambiguous, or dangerous. A tsunami smashes a harbour city into “tide-rows of burning debris”; children chase snakes in summer meadows. The primordial past spins off “rogue by-products and flawed replicas,” while lonely office workers get high on back porches and drink themselves to sleep. The musical and kinetic energy of Grotesque Tenderness is driven by our urge to understand pain and our hunger to reach an imperfect reconciliation with the problems of guilt and suffering. But in the tradition of William Blake, these poems affirm again and again that “the lit / world goes on living” and life justifies itself through its own workings. From elegant lyrics of alienation and heartbreak to long-form mythopoeia and lament, these poems approach beauty, ugliness, even criminality in a spirit of wonder and vulnerability.
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 81 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 whereabouts written by Edward Carson and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 2021-08-02 with total page 84 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: in the poem / of the world / there once / was a map / of the map / composed in / the likeness / of a poem In this riddling and seeking book of poems, Edward Carson navigates the emotional, often contradictory intelligence of the heart and mind. In three interrelated segments, whereabouts powerfully charts the tight emotional spaces between thinking and language, beauty and perception, love and the polemics of self and other. Taking on cartographic distortions and dynamics of the map metaphor, "thereabouts (or the mapmaker's dilemma)" playfully confronts the quandaries of personal navigation when the wants and needs of the esemplastic mind are forever devising new places to be. Exploring the brain, its neurons, and serpentine synaptic connections, "hereabouts (in fourteen scans)" advances a poetry of rhizomic communication capturing networks of thought and feeling that spring from both conflict and caress. Within a relationship's countless masquerades and revelations, "whereabouts (the lovers' discourse)" invites the reader to eavesdrop on a series of intimate conversations wherein lovers argue and act out their richly populated inner lives, addressing issues of gender, pleasure, communication, control, and sex.
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 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 rushes from the river disappointment written by stephanie roberts and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 2020-07-02 with total page 92 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "those of us who've seen miracles know how to ask. / if you've asked, do you love me, i almost certainly / don't love you." This meditative, musically attentive collection explores the confounding nature of intimate relationships. stephanie roberts's poetic expression is often irreverent, unapologetic, and infused with humour that can take surprisingly grave turns. rushes from the river disappointment traverses city, country, and fantasy using nature as artery through the emotional landscape. As they wrestle to come to terms with the effects of uncertainty and grief on hope and belief, these diverse field notes are interspersed with the fabulous: a polar bear and owl engage in flirtation, a time traveller appears on a lake, an erotic scene takes place on a train, and we confront "people capable of eating popcorn at the movie of your agony." roberts's language is dense with images and sometimes acrobatic. In poems that affirm love and desire as treasures fought for more than just felt, rushes from the river disappointment turns an unblinking gaze on the failures of courage that distance us from love.
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.
