Bøger i Laurier Poetry serien

The selected poems in Desire Never Leaves span Tim Lilburn's career, demonstrating the evolution of a unique and careful thinker as he takes his place among the nation's premier writers. This edition of his poetry untangles many of the strands running through his works, providing insight into a poetic world that is both spectacular and humbling. The introduction by Alison Calder situates Lilburn's writing in an alternate tradition of prairie poetry that relies less on the vernacular and more on philosophy and meditation. Examining Lilburn's antecedents in Christian mysticism and the ascetic tradition, Calder stresses the paradoxical nature of Lilburn's writingthe expression of loss through plenitude. The divine in the natural world is glimpsed in brief flashes; nevertheless, the poet, driven by love, continues his quest for what glitters in things. Tim Lilburn's afterword is an evocative meditation grounded in personal history. He speaks of how poetry, a craning quiet, allows one to hear what is alive in the world. He also describes how poetry is resolutely attached to both a historical moment and an individual subjectivity that is inevitably anchored in time. Lilburn's poetry is both a religious undertaking and a political gesture that speaks to the urgency of situating ourselves where we live.

Arcing across thirty years and seven volumes, Jan Zwicky's poetry has always been acutely musical (and sensitive to the silence out of which music comes). In the compositions in Chamber Music , the first anthology of Zwicky's poems, one may perceive the attunement of her vocations: poet, philosopher, violinist. Her poetry both praises and relinquishes the earth, bearing witness to the fierce skies of the prairies and the freezing rain of the West Coast. Enacting the virtue of clarity prized and defended by her explicitly philosophical work, this poetry is both resonant and integrated. It is also formally diverse, ranging from the singular focus of the lyric ode to suites of variations and fugal structures, from polyphonic textures to the sprawling reach of narrative gestures. Throughout, one feels the deft hand of an adept using powerful metaphors to explore themes of colonial violence, environmental devastation, spiritual catastrophe, and transformation. Resisting Western philosophy's exclusion of imagination from civic life, Zwicky's poetry is noteworthy for the tension it achieves between the abstract and the personal, the general and the particular. Meditating repeatedly on themes of love and grief, this poetry is at once passionately committed to the lucidity of its utterances and the fidelity of its images.

Opening doors, dreaming awake, tracing networks of music and meaning, Marlatts poetry stands out as an essential engagement with what matters to anyone writing with a social-environmental conscience. Rivering includes poems inspired by the village of Steveston where, before the war, a Japanese-Canadian community lived within the rhythms of salmon on the Fraser River delta. Also gathered into Rivering : lesbian love poetry from Touch to my Tongue ; a transformance of Nicole Brossards Mauve ; passages from The Given , winner of the 2009 Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize; a traditional Kuri song from the Noh drama, The Gull ; and an unpublished excerpt from the chamber opera Shadow Catch. Difficult, beautiful, heart-breaking realities of the twenty-first century are urgently immediate in selections from Liquidities: Vancouver Poems Then and Now . All of the poems speak to Marlatts poetics of place and of language as passage between distant or disparate human beings, and between human beings and the more-than-human world. The selections are framed by Susan Knutsons deeply attentive critical introduction and by Marlatts immediacies of writing, a new lyrical essay investigating the act of writing. Closing with a walking meditation situated by her Buddhist practice, Rivering is both a pocket Marlatt and an introduction to one of the best poets of our time.