The best of beloved poet Alden Nowlan's explicitly honest, direct, and insightful poetry. Now featuring an introduction by Susan Musgrave. Alden Nowlan, one of Canada's finest and most influential poets, died in 1983. He leaves a rich legacy of poetry that is accessible yet profound, and that speaks to people's lives with wry observation and keen insight. Alden Nowlan Selected Poems is for Nowlan fans and new readers alike. The poems included in this volume reflect the recurring themes that illuminate Nowlan's work, and it is truly the best of his poetry. Above all, this volume is a tribute to a poet who deserves to be treasured for all time.
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"A best poem fulfills the promise set out in its first syllable, word, syntax, line break, and soundscape to its reader/listener." “What is a best poem?” asks Best Canadian Poetry 2020 guest editor Marilyn Dumont, the critically acclaimed and award-winning author of four poetry collections. “A best poem fulfills the promise set out in its first syllable, word, syntax, line break, and soundscape to its reader/listener. The work required to complete a poem takes risk, skill, and practice, and the poems selected for this anthology all exhibit such attributes.” In precise language that exposes the attitudes inherent in English, innovative forms that illuminate their content, and mastery of music akin to a composer’s score, the fifty poems collected here fulfill their promises and, in doing so, demonstrate the country’s rich diversity and talent for invention—and the promises it might fulfill as well. Featuring introductions by series editor Anita Lahey and advisory editor Amanda Jernigan, and poems by: Kazim Ali • Amber Dawn • Billy-Ray Belcourt • Brandi Bird • Selina Boan • Margret Bollerup • Rita Bouvier • Tim Bowling • Frances Boyle • Di Brandt • Rob Budde • Mugabi Byenkya • Dell Catherall • Margaret Christakos Ivan Coyote • Barry Dempster • Kyle Flemmer • Susan Haldane • Louise Bernice Halfe–Sky Dancer • Jane Eaton Hamilton • Maureen Scott Harris • Dallas Hunt • Ashley Hynd • Babo Kamel • Conor Kerr • Don Kerr • Fiona Tinwei Lam • Natalie Lim • Tanis MacDonald • Nyla Matuk • Sadie McCarney • Tara McGowan-Ross • Erín Moure • Roger Nash • Samantha Nock • Erin Noteboom • Abby Paige • Geoff Pevlin • Alycia Pirmohamed • Jana Prikryl • Jason Purcell • Armand Garnet Ruffo • Rebecca Salazar • Robyn Sarah • Erin Soros • Kevin Spenst • John Elizabeth Stintzi • Andrea Thompson • Sanna Wani • Adele Wiseman
Robert Currie's Shimmers of Light: New and Selected Poems uses the vernacular of ordinary working people to tell stories and sing songs of small-town prairie life. Like Alden Nowlan, or more recently, Billy Collins, this poet constructs poems from the unvarnished wood of common language--there's no veneer, no glossing over here. These poems "work like small exquisite time machines . . ." writes poet Lorna Crozier in her introduction to this extensive collection of work dating from the 1970s to the present day. Currie's poems powerfully evoke the reality of prairie life, with a frequent focus on the hard exteriors men and boys are expected to present to the world, despite the swarm of doubt and conflict roiling inside them. The characters who populate these poems are subject to difficult weather, internal and external, but their lives are sometimes illuminated by "a sudden radiance": a deeper understanding of self, a breathtaking expanse of sky, the generosity of a friend or lover. The beauty of the unflinching rhythm and cadence of the poems brings light to the darker corners of even the most painful times. From a father's tenderness in the face of his young son's fears, to the death of a lifelong friend from ALS, to earlier narrative poems about depression-era deprivation and hardship, this work is carefully crafted, deeply honest, and open-hearted. With a foreword by Lorna Crozier and an afterword by Mark Abley.
On "A Girl Like This Might Have Loved Glenn Gould": "The poem sits up at its greasy-spoon counter and recounts its tale, a kind of cryptic plain-speech, an inverted code, all the more puzzling for what it plainly says: 'Under a spell so the wrong ones can't find it, / So can't get saved, ' as Robert Frost said." -- Jeffery Donaldson Absorbed in the small, everyday rituals of existence, this remarkable collection of poems tears open the fruit of life and scoops out beauty and joy, pain and suffering, in equal measure. Ritual Lights takes the reader on a journey through an underworld that is both familiar and uncanny, a space between death and life where one nourishes the other. Shadowed by the aftermath of sexual assault, Joelle Barron places candles in the darkest alcoves, illuminates mysteries, and rises again to an abundant Earth where the darkness is transformed into rich loam. These poems follow the speaker through grieving and loss, heartbreak, repression, and discovery, seeking, never finding an answer, but finding meaning in the work of continuing. A meditation on trauma and identity, deeply vulnerable and reserved, funny and full of rage, Ritual Lights explores the sometimes messy and ugly, but always necessary, nature of survival.
It's often said that the main export of the Maritimes is Maritimers, and the same is true of Newfoundland. "Going down the road" is a way of life, but so is coming home for Christmas. It is tradition marked by happiness, fun, and sometimes less comfortable emotions. Given the regional penchant for yarn spinning, this common experience yields an abundance of stories. In An Orange from Portugal, editor Anne Simpson takes liberties with the concept of "story" to produce a book bursting with Christmas flavour. Many of her choices are fiction, others are memoirs, tall tales, poems, or essays, and still others defy classification. Some authors are nationally and even internationally famous, some are well known in the region, and others are published here for the first time. Spanning more than a century of seasonal writing, the collection includes a description of killing a pig aboard the sailing ship Argonauta for Christmas dinner; Hugh MacLennan"s Halifax waif who wants nothing more than for Santa to bring him a real orange, an orange from Portugal; a story by Alden Nowlan and another by Harry Bruce giving very different versions of what the animals in the barn do on Christmas Eve; a story about Jewish children hanging up their stockings; and very new work by young writers Lisa Moore and Michael Crummey. Beautiful poems by Lynn Davies, Milton Acorn and others leaven the collection for readers of all persuasions. Other authors include: Wayne Johnston, Mary Pratt, David Adams Richards, Carol Bruneau, Wilfred Grenfeld, L.M. Montgomery, Paul Bowdring, Grace Ladd, Herb Curtis, Joan Clark, Ernest Buckler, Rhoda Graser, Bert Batstone, Elisabeth Harvor, David Weale, Charles G.D. Roberts, Ronald F. Hawkins, Mark Jarman, Elsie Charles Basque, Richard Cumyn, Herménégilde Chiasson, Stan Dragland, Alistair MacLeod, and Bernice Morgan. An Orange from Portugal is a Christmas feast, with the scent of turkey and the sound of laughter wafting from the kitchen, and a flurry of snow outside the window.
The house is still standing is peopled with charlatans, gingerbread men, children, and savants -- the thousands and the particular. Adrienne Bartlett builds this nimble first collection with a supple craft. The poems deke and swerve, from the wry to the theatrical to the intimate. Whether riffing on the secret identities of public intellectuals and pop icons or penning elegiac verse, Barrett's voice is strong, anchored, inviting. Although she takes her readers through both "substance / and its downfall," in the end, the structure is sound, she is holding up.
