✨Virtual Book Launch: Saturday, February 10,12:30pm EST. Pour a cup of tea and get cozy for this virtual book launch and poetry reading from Rose Garden Press’s new release, Intent on Flowering, with three poets: Penn Kemp, Katie Jeresky and Jessica Lee McMillan. Please register here: @wordsfestival. On the Lunar New Year! Free. Chapbooks are available for purchase @rosegarden_press.
✨In-person Poetry Readings:Chapbooks will be available for purchase.
Sunday, February 25, 12:30-1:30pm EST. Join Penn Kemp and Katie Jeresky with cellist Luc Julian in Heeman’s lush tropical greenhouse for a special in-person poetry reading of Rose Garden Press’s new release, Intent of Flowering. Heeman’s Greenhouse, 20422 Nissouri Road, Thorndale, ON N0M 2P0. Grab a tea, coffee, shake or sundae when you arrive at the in-house Cafe Beanery and join us in the houseplants section! RSVP by sending an email to katiejeresky@gmail.com. Free.
✨ Sunday, April 28, 2-4pm. Poetry Reading among the Alpacas by Penn Kemp and Katie Jeresky with cellist Luc Julian. 2211 Egremont Drive, RR5 Strathroy ON, N7G 3H6. Contact: Thandi, info@timbuktufarms.com. Celebrating National Poetry Month on the theme of Weather. By donation.
✨ Wednesday, June 5, 6:30-8pm. Black Mallard Reading Series features Penn Kemp and D.A. Lockhart, Mykonos Restaurant, 572 Adelaide St. N., London ON. It’s World Environment Day! https://blackmallardpoetry.wixsite.com/home. Free.
✨ Saturday, June 15, 10:30-11:30am. Sounds of the Forest: Music and Poetry Reading at Meadowlily Nature Reserve on the south side of the Thames River between Highbury Avenue and Meadowlily Road, London, ON N6G 2N5. Passport to Nature in support of Thames Talbot Land Trust, https://www.thamestalbotlandtrust.ca/passport_to_nature. Free.
“Celebrating the Forest of Forest City” , online exhibit launch, Embassy Cultural House, London ON. www.embassyculturalhouse.ca Curators Emmy Meredith, Ron Benner, Jamelie Hassan and Olivia Mossuto: embassyculturalhouse@gmail.com
✨Jim Andrews from Vancouver included my poem “Lethologica” in his wondrous See of Po series: https://seaofpo.vispo.com?p=pk. And on Jim Andrews’s manifesto, manual, and magazine, https://vispo.com/writings/essays/Sea_of_Po2.pdf: P. 61. For Sea of Po, I wanted to write a language poem that would lend itself to animation, to movement, to be read in swirls, side to side, and yet form couplets. Hence, Lethologica, so that the word is not lost in Lethe’s forgetful current, but is re-imagined as image, as colour.
✨Upcoming In-person Poetry Readings
Sunday, February 25, 12:30-1:30pm EST. Join Penn Kemp and Katie Jeresky with cellist Luc Julian in Heeman’s lush tropical greenhouse for a special in-person poetry reading of Rose Garden Press’s new release, Intent of Flowering. Heeman’s Greenhouse, 20422 Nissouri Road, Thorndale, ON N0M 2P0. Grab a tea, coffee, shake or sundae when you arrive at the in-house Cafe Beanery and join us in the houseplants section! RSVP by sending an email to katiejeresky@gmail.com. Free. Chapbooks available for purchase.
✨ Monday, April 22. Earth Day.
✨ Sunday, April 28, 2-4pm. Poetry Reading among the Alpacas by Penn Kemp and Katie Jeresky with cellist Luc Julian. 2211 Egremont Drive, RR5 Strathroy ON, N7G 3H6. Contact: Thandi, info@timbuktufarms.com. Celebrating National Poetry Month on the theme of Weather. By donation.
✨ Wednesday, June 5, 6:30-8pm. Black Mallard Reading Series features Penn Kemp and D.A. Lockhart, Mykonos Restaurant, 572 Adelaide St. N., London ON. It’s World Environment Day! https://blackmallardpoetry.wixsite.com/home. Free.
✨ Saturday, June 15, 10:30-11:30am. Sounds of the Forest: Music and Poetry Reading at Meadowlily Nature Reserve on the south side of the Thames River between Highbury Avenue and Meadowlily Road, London, ON N6G 2N5. Passport to Nature in support of Thames Talbot Land Trust, https://www.thamestalbotlandtrust.ca/passport_to_nature. Free. ✨ “Celebrating the Forest of Forest City”, online exhibit launch, Embassy Cultural House, London ON. www.embassyculturalhouse.ca. Curators Emmy Meredith, Ron Benner, Jamelie Hassan and Olivia Mossuto: embassyculturalhouse@gmail.com
Now up! Intent on Flowering, anthology, Rose Garden Press, 2024. Contributing poets: Katie Jeresky, Penn Kemp and Jessica Lee McMillan. This remarkable collection is curated by Rose Garden Press for their handprinted book. Contact: hello@rosegardenpress.ca, Michelle Arnett and Michele Vanderwal @rosegarden_press. To order: https://rosegardenpress.ca/intent-on-flowering/
Kevin Spenst, “Chuffed About Chapbooks” on my project, “Poem for Peace in Many Voices”. SubTerrain issue #95, 2024.
Recently and Recording ✨Virtual Book Launch: Saturday, February 10, 2024. Book launch and poetry reading from Rose Garden Press’s new release, Intent on Flowering, with three poets: Penn Kemp, Katie Jeresky and Jessica Lee McMillan. On the Lunar New Year! Missed this lovely weaving of voices? Here it is https://fb.watch/q7u_oWXOJq/! Thanks @RoseGardenPress ! Special #thanks to @JoshLambier https://wordsfest.ca/ @PHWestern
Recently Read... January 17, 7 pm. Antler River Poetry, Celebrating small presses! Karen Schindler and Rob McClennan. With readings by Katie Jeresky and Penn Kemp from Intent on Flowering, Rose Garden Press, hello@rosegardenpress.ca, rosegardenpress.ca
What holds Sorrow and Joy in its lap? ‘Setsunai’ implies what has faded from brightness, what can’t quite be recalled, beyond knowing that everything passes. Snow dropping on snow-spangled trees.
We share this deep new reality for which no words suffice…maybe one in Japanese, expressing the loss of ten thousand things. Something quiet in the snow, snow, the silencing snow.
What holds Sorrow and Joy in its lap? ‘Setsunai’ implies what has faded from brightness, what can’t quite be recalled, beyond knowing that everything passes. Snow dropping on snow-spangled trees.
We share this deep new reality for which no words suffice…maybe one in Japanese, expressing the loss of ten thousand things. Something quiet in the snow, snow, the silencing snow.
Sometimes I hear you speaking. More often you nod approval or shake your head to comment in replay, in dream, in small glimpses.
You hover about at back of mind, at nape of neck, those startled rising hairs.
The Winter Widow (ii)
The trick is knowing not to choose but to listen. The choice is made, already. You are wafting between up and down, between dimensions I don’t as yet know. The indeterminate unknown prompts me to poetry, to remember you there.
Sunday afternoon, July 9 at Timbuktu Farm was so magical we are repeating the event on September 10, 3-5 pm: please register soon on https://www.timbuktufarm.com/, if you are in the London area. Seating among the alpacas in the barn is limited. A very special, endearing occasion we invite you to enjoy, hosted by Thandi Van Wulven.
My reading was sponsored by the League of Canadian Poets.
“Penn Kemp and Robin Israel provided us with delicious poetry among the alpacas. We enjoyed ourselves immensely at Timbuktu. What an inspired idea and environment, poetry among the alpacas. I loved the juxtaposition of sound poetry with its rhythms and contrasting phonetics and a gentle interactive audience of curious alpacas, contented horses, and vocal cows. At times the children seemed spellbound. It was a perfect afternoon. ” Bryan Lavery, Writer, Culinary Experience Facilitator, Tourism Proponent, Chef/Restaurateur
“That was fun! What a peaceful, transformative experience it was to go to a reading with the alpacas, horses and cows from Timbuktu ecotourism farm. Penn Kemp started with a poem about foxes, and finished with a very engaging and interactive sound poem. Such a unique experience!” Kathy McLaughlin, Business Development Manager · Downtown London
Reading Among the Alpacas, As It Happened
Sheer Eden… and Sheared Alpacas
On Sunday, July 9, just as I entered the open barn, ready to perform, our host Thandi, normally so calm but now looking a little flustered, ushered me over to a nearby pen. There a first-time mama alpaca had given birth to a feeble little male ten minutes before. Mama Leila trusted Thandi so deeply that when she was struggling in labour, she came to Thandi for help. It was a breech birth, so as he was turning blue, Thandi had to pull the newborn out, holding all four hooves tight in one hand. He struggled to hold his bewildered head up on his scrawny, matted neck, struggled even to breathe. A friend and I stood there beaming Reiki at him as Thandi stroked his throat to open his air passage.
New mama Leila seemed indifferent, puzzled by this wobbly new creature who had so weirdly emerged after a tough labour. Several experienced mother alpacas, however, came up and nosed the baby tenderly, encouraging him into this new world, as aunties everywhere would. Could he find his mother’s udder? He soon stood up on gangly, splayed legs and staggered up under his mama, his tail to her udder, backwards the way he was born, as we began the reading. But within an hour he was gamboling outside in the pasture.
A baby alpaca is not a calf, a cub, a kit or pup or kid: it’s a cria. The term is derived from the Spanish for a baby animal, “cría”, which derives from criar “to bring up, rear, nurse”, going back to the Latin creāre “to bring into being, give birth to, cause to grow” — Indeed!
His name… we pondered… is POET! He is now thriving. Poet, the cria alpaca lives! Pics above and below.
I was listening for the hum that contented alpacas make as I performed sound poetry with the audience, but perhaps mother and baby needed some alone time to bond. The female alpacas gathered round, nibbling the food pellets that Thandi had laid in front of the chair where we read. Interesting that the females cling to one another, truly herd animals and cautious, while the males are more curious, bolder in approaching humans nose to nose, allowing themselves to be petted. How appropriate that the name for them is ‘machos’!
Because of the birth, the males were outside in the pasture, looking in the Dutch door, along with two horses, a huge one-horned Charolais cow, very friendly, and her two calves. One is a yearling steer called… Stewart, because he is bound for the stew pot in January but meanwhile is much loved. I found myself side-eyeing his flanks, his ribs, but he didn’t seem to suspect my ill intent.
The horses and cattle were allowed in at intermission to mingle with the guests, nuzzling us in a friendly way, searching for treats. Thandi handed fistfuls of pellets for all the children, and us, to feed the animals. Even the toddlers who came were enthralled. Robyn Israel started us off with the engaging story of her beloved dog, Harley who couldn’t be with us because he might in his excitement spook the alpacas. They are such gentle, mild-mannered, affectionate creatures. And what a paradise they live in, at Thandi’s place.
Timbuktu Farm is in glorious rolling green farmland, off Highway 22. It’s barely a mile from my great-grandparents’ farms, where my grandparents were born in neighbouring yellow brick homes, where my grandmother and mother were born and raised: Confederation Line, beside cousin Arthur Currie’s family farm. Near where I too was born! So I read stories from there, including the fox poems that lead off Fox Haunts. FUN! Ah, the adventures of itinerant poets!
So come and meet Poet and the sixteen other alpacas, along with a woman poet and storyteller, for a marvellous adventure in this nearby Eden. We hope to see you September 10, same time, same place, for a glorious afternoon at Timbuktu Farm, https://www.timbuktufarm.com.
Novels and essays, occasional poetry. Thanks to London Public Library for the loan of all these books. Next month, all poetry!
Margaret Atwood, Burning Questions: Essays and Occasional Pieces, 2004 to 2021 “There are portals in space-time, opening and closing like little frog mouths. Things disappear into them, just vanish; but then they might appear again without warning. Things and people, here and gone and then maybe here. You can’t predict it.” “The arts as we’ve come to term them are not a frill, they are the heart of the matter because they are about our hearts and our technological inventiveness is generated by our emotions not just by our minds. A society without the arts would have broken its mirror and cut out its heart. It would no longer be what we recognize as human.” The audio presents strong readings, not well attributed unless you recognize the voice: Ann Dowd reads the essay on The Testaments! https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/5423041534
Geraldine Brooks, Horse How beautifully Geraldine Brooks interweaves the story lines of Horse, as if she herself were articulating bones for display as her character Jess does. So well researched and written: “a beautifully unified studio portrait”; “this horse had an exceptional anatomy.” Cf. Thomas Scott’s painting of Lexington. https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/5316937712
Conyer Clayton, We shed our skin like dynamite A beautiful collection from Guernica Editions. Such accomplished poems do not read like a first book! Her seasoned surrealism leaps across grief to beauty in fierce images guaranteed to surprise and entangle the reader: “the dreams I had last night sniff and roar like broken plumbing…” She is reading in London ON on March 22! See https://antlerriverpoetry.ca/conyer-clayton/ , https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/5428504250
Elisabeth de Mariaffi, The Retreat The Banff Centre for the Arts has never felt more ominous! The physical setting is gorgeous and dangerous: watch out for Nature, warns one of the characters. A retreat from daily life for a few artists, lucky… or unlucky. And another study in misogyny. The Retreat ends in a strange, somewhat unbelievable retreat from unutterable trauma: “But she’s already imagining how her dancers will look. How to make these movements, this broken body, into something beautiful. The bear is behind her now. Maeve reaches down and lights a flare.” Now that’s artistic diligence! https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/5341723590
Jennifer Egan, The Candy House So engaging at first, with interacting plot lines… but then a proliferation of characters and styles, bound to confuse. I’ll stick with this: “He was feeling the collective without any machinery at all. And its stories, infinite and particular, would be his to tell.” https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/4969744307
Zetta Elliott, Say Her Name Powerful, poignant, accessible and essential poems for All Black Lives Matter. With reference to her mentors, Black women poets. We are wise. We will rise. We
Lucy Ellmann, Man or Mango I did enjoy Lucy Ellmann’s quirky Man or Mango for its innovative form, for its ruthless take on her characters… for its lists! Here, the author is Queen and deals with her subjects unsparingly but suitably. Earth itself is a character: “the earth should spin a little faster on its axis, fling us from the trees we’d cling to, hurl us into outer space. nature is cruel but the cruellest seam runs through us: we dream of apocalypse.” And apocalypse arrives. Be careful what you wish for, man or mango, man gone. https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/5362717662
Shea Ernshaw, A History of Wild Places: A Novel Not the Pastoral one might expect from the title, but a Pastoral restored after many tricks and treats, twists and turns. Who knew the apparent power of hypnosis? https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/5324556548
Elyse Friedman, The Opportunist The Opportunist is a delight! When Succession hits an island off Vancouver Island, mayhem ensues, maybe. Guess who among many is The Opportunist… or the most opportunistic? Twists and turns galore frolic to a glorious ending. Fun and Fast! What a sweet Easter Egg is laid in The Opportunist! Kelly’s original name is Aisling: “Aisling is an Irish feminine given name meaning “dream” or “vision”. The aisling, or vision poem, is a poetic genre that developed during the late 17th and 18th centuries in Irish language poetry.” If you loved The Opportunist, you’ll enjoy Susan Juby’s equally engaging novel, Mindful of Murder, also set on a West Coast island! https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/5269693695
Natalie Haynes, Stone Blind Spoiler alert. In Stone Blind, Natalie Haynes questions just who is a monster: the three Gorgons who bestow such love on one another, or the putative hero, whiney Perseus, who is as callous as he is ignorant. In this book, though, everyone loves their mother, no matter how distant mother might be, no matter how she acts. Mothers are victims of their fate as are daughters. Andromeda chooses Perseus, a deal with the devil she accepts to escape her mother’s aim for her. Danae, raped by Zeus, is devoted to their offspring, Perseus. Ceto, mother of the Gorgons, is Poseidon’s favourite sea monster, until she is killed by Medusa’s unwitting stare. Metis, whose name means wisdom, when pregnant with Athene, is swallowed by her rapist, Zeus, so that their son will not overpower him. Motherless Athene understands nothing of love, of any kind of relationship. Having sprung fully formed from Zeus’s forehead, she represents the cruel clarity of intellect untouched by softer emotions of the heart. Dear, kind Medusa. Of all the personages in Stone Blind, divine or mortal, Medusa is the only one who is unconditionally compassionate. To save a mortal girl from rape or death, she allows Poseidon to rape her instead, in Athene’s temple. Outraged at such sacrilege, Athene blames Medusa and curses her with blindness. And worse, when the Gorgon opens her eyes, her gaze turns any onlooker to stone. Even though she attempts to save others, by living in a solitary cave, Perseus, with Athene’s help, decapitates her. So yes, the stupid hero Perseus rescues Andromeda by flashing the Gorgon head at the sea dragon. Kindness is not redeemed nor rewarded but becomes the instrument of petrifying, implacable nemesis, Let the snakes shave their chapter.
“I’m wondering if you still think of her as a monster. I suppose it depends on what you think that word means. Monsters are, what? Ugly? Terrifying? Gorgons are both these things, certainly, although Medusa wasn’t always. Can a monster be beautiful if it is still terrifying? Perhaps it depends on how you experience fear and judge beauty.”
Haynes is a remarkable performer, wittily voicing all the personae with a novelist’s prophetic omniscience. Listen to the audio book if you can. Bonus: you will hear how to correctly pronounce the Ancient Greek names. (That C is it hard? Yes, throughout. Then why not use the letter K, as other translations do?)
Stone Blind even gives voice to the land. The olive grove sacred to Athene has its say, as does a chattering Crow, and Herpeta, the snakes that swirl about the Gorgons’ heads. And there’s Hesperides, the laughing garden nymphs who guard Hera’s golden apples. We begin with Panopeia, the Nereid nymph who sights land and approaching storms: “But the place you have found yourself means you are already at the end of the earth, so you’ll need to find your way back.”
Adelle Hedge Coke, Look at this blue: a poem A devastating long poem recording so many genocides in California, listed across many divisions of life, starting with a blue butterfly. The assemblage may be reclaimed at huge cost: “100 thousand million stars in the sky road milk corn mush acorn take some home California, come home, somewhere beyond brutal likes beauty, unrequited,
requite now, quiet now, requite kindness mutual aid, reciprocal abundance, beauty as far as land is poppied, Chaparral roam, bladderpod stand let this dream, breath plume, vascular thrum strengthen” https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/5258586437
Alice Henderson, A Ghost of Caribou: Alex Carter #3 After solving A Solitude of Wolverines and A Blizzard of Polar Bears (set in Churchill, Manitoba), here comes intrepid wildlife biologist Alex Carter to save the day… and the mountain caribou, not to mention old growth forest. Good work, Alex! This thriller within an eco-novel presents fascinating information about vanishing species like the mountain caribou without succumbing to preaching, given the natural world’s precarious predicament: “But it was more than just personal loss. She labored in the trenches of what often felt like a hopeless cause. Habitat destruction, overdevelopment, greed, species extinction. It felt insurmountable at times. So many people weren’t tuned in to what was happening with the planet. Biodiversity was plummeting, pieces of the intricate web of life just vanishing, leaving holes, weakening the very structure of life on Earth.” Meanwhile, Alex in Action! 3.5* because the plot is SO unwieldy.https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/5334884982
Monica Heisey, Really Good, Actually Joking through the teeth of grief, the sitcom one-liners wore me down. Initially insightful wry laughs wore off when repeated. Only seldom does the ever chipper Maggie get real about divorce and living alone. “When this happened, I felt, in order: stupid; sad; disappointed; vindicated when I remembered something similar happened to Joan Didion in The Year of Magical Thinking.” Then she realizes, “I was not an incredibly chic voice of a generation who had lost her life’s love”. She’s got that right. But then, I’m of a different vintage. Not sure the above is a recommendation, except to Millennials:) https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/5333165236
Emma Hooper, We Should Not Be Afraid of the Sky Historical novels ain’t what they used to be. Hooper’s epic travelogue set across the Roman Empire is more fun and more inviting than a hagiography. This highly original story only bogs down in the middle for a bit. Hooper’s lovely language, with hypnotic rhythms of repetition, is almost musical, even when conversational. Nine twin sisters and their diverging stories: none of them Virgin Suicides, though one becomes a Vestal Virgin in Carthage, another a saint. Brilliant. O St. Quiteria: you are FABulous. https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/4969743932
Natalie Jenner, Bloomsbury Girls: a Novel “Only connect”: in this novel set in 1950’s literary Bloomsbury, connections matter.Juliet Stevenson reads it perfectly. Competent women take over the stodgy old bookstore! Read it just after seeing the last season of Endeavour, set in 1970, with the same sexist tropes. A trilogy of lively characters, following THE JANE AUSTEN SOCIETY, with EVERY TIME WE SAY GOODBYE forthcoming in 2024. https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/5421197779
Jessica Johns, Bad Cree What a privilege it is to read the extraordinary Indigenous writing that is being published in Canada these days. Expanding a short story into a novel sometimes stretches the original out of shape, and Bad Cree shows stretch marks but what a fascinating all-female tale! A fascinating, sometimes askew mixture of Cree lore and dreaming; grief literature and coming of age. “‘I noticed that the colours [in dreams] meant something, too, but even they changed meaning without any clear pattern.’ As Auntie talks, the lazy river of energy enveloping us starts to quicken.” The reader is right inside this family, as the women work in community to ward off “the bad”: “Now that we’re all carrying our secrets together, my breath comes easier.” “I still hold a piece of the bad inside me. I used to think enough love was supposed to wipe all the bad clean, but I don’t think that’s true anymore. The truth is, I’m brimming with love. The love pouring from the tip of kokum’s finger when she pointed out wapanewask [yarrow, a protector plant].” https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/5300781854
Eva Jurczyk, The Department of Rare Books and Special Collections A bibliophile’s literary mystery which our slighted librarian of a certain age solves… and so upsets the male dominated academic apple cart! https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/5254739463
Christina Baker Kline, The Exiles “Sir John Franklin KCH FRS FLS FRGS (16 April 1786 – 11 June 1847) was a British Royal Navy officer and Arctic explorer, and served as Lieutenant-Governor of Van Diemen’s Land from 1839 to 1843. Lady Jane Franklin adopted the daughter of the chief of an indigenous Australian tribe. She was renamed Mathinna and was raised with their own daughter Eleanor, but she was abandoned in Tasmania when the Franklins returned to England in 1843”
Christina Baker Kline’s well-named novel, The Exiles features two eight-year-olds at significant moments in their lives: Hazel, sent by her mother out to the Glasgow streets to steal, only to be caught and transported. Also little Mathinna, the daughter of an Aboriginal chieftain, taken by Lady Jane Franklin in 1840 from all the child knew of her culture, is raised as a kind of pet in European guise. All did not go well for either transplanted girl, given such disruption. Sir John Franklin from the arctic expedition does not come out well either! https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/5389241445
Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperfield A tour de force: Demon Copperfield stands on its own, engrossing and propulsive. And yet it’s firmly based on David Copperfield by Charles Dickens, names of characters as well as the plot. https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/5254711969
Talia Lakshmi Kolluri, What We Fed to the Manticore Talking animals? I know. But these creatures and chimeras tell powerful and poignant stories vulnerably embedded in climate changes not of their doing. As the human author writes, “I dissolved the distance in my mind between myself and the wild world, which helped me understand that the story of my life includes the story of all the life that surrounds us.” https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/5451143932
Laurie Lico Albanese, HesterHester by Laurie Lico Albanese is a study in synaesthesia’s repercussions over the centuries, read in a lovely Scots brogue in Hester’s voice. A as the Scarlet Letter! One more way in which I’m a witch, and lucky to be alive in this century. Witches are getting quite the splash lately in novels like Hester. Love the naming from grandmother to grandmother in a lineage of red-haired girls I can claim, as my grandmothers had red or auburn hair. https://www.goodreads.com/review/edit/59807978
Clarice Lispector, An Apprenticeship or The Book of Pleasures Was I reading a Romance, beautifully written: a condescending male lover, a philosophy professor (of course!) grooms Lori into his ideal woman? Or an examination of what it is to love, what it is to be human… Sheila Heti’s inspired Afterword to An Apprenticeship or The Book of Pleasures by Clarice Lispector led me to believe the latter, “to be worth of life itself”. https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/5320011999
Christiana Jean MacEwen, BONE STONE RIVER SKY: Work and Words What a glorious collection of yes, BONE STONE RIVER and SKY! The earth, the water, the sky: all speaking. Truly spectacular.
“If you want to write a memoir without writing a memoir, go ahead and call it something else. Let other people argue about it. Arguing with yourself or the dead will get you nowhere.” https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/5144191116
Lydia Millet, Dinosaurs: A Novel After relishing the anarchic, social world of encroaching apocalypse that Lydia Millett created in The Children’s Bible, I was surprised by the singular, nearly solipsistic p.o.v. in Dinosaurs. It seems that Gil must have read Richard Power on trees as he moves from solitude to communion with a tree and from that one tree with infinity:
“He’d learned to be alone, walking. And it was still good now and then. For thought. For recognition.
But being alone was also a closed loop. A loop with a slipknot, say. The loop could be small or large, but it always returned to itself.
You had to untie the knot, finally. Open the loop and then everything sank in. And everyone.
Then you could see what was true—that separateness had always been the illusion. A simple trick of flesh.
The world was inside you after that. Because, after all, you were made of two people only at the very last instant.
Before that, of a multiplication so large it couldn’t be fathomed. Back and back in time. A tree in a forest of trees, where men grew from apes and birds grew from dinosaurs.
The topmost branches were single cells. And even those cells were not the start, for they drew life from the atmosphere.
The air. And the vapor. Suspended.
It was the fear and loneliness that came in waves that often stopped him from remembering the one thing. The one thing and the greatest thing.
Frustrating: he could only ever see it for a second before he lost sight of it again. Released his grip. Let it slip away into the vague background.
But it had to be held close, the tree.
In the dark, when nothing else was sure, the soaring tree sheltered you. Almost the only thing you had to see before you slept.
How you came not from a couple or a few but from infinity.
So you had no beginning. And you would never end.”
So the one becomes the many and back again. I’m glad for Gil, but missed Millet’s wider social consciousness. Very good on AZ bird lore! I was tempted to give Dinosaurs 4* but these last pages pushed it up to a shining 5! https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/5273210602
Zarqa Nawaz, Jameela Green Ruins Everything* What a light touch on problematic foreign policies, ongoing in the Middle East, which Zarqa Nawaz explores with undiplomatic aplomb. Fun, with a skewer. https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/5303150937
Zarqa Nawaz, Jameela Green Ruins Everything* What a light touch on problematic foreign policies, ongoing in the Middle East, which Zarqa Nawaz explores with undiplomatic aplomb. Fun, with a skewer. https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/5303150937
Nina Mingya Powles, Small Bodies of Water An intriguing memoir of displacement: “Where is the place your body is anchored? Which body of water is yours?” Interesting to read alongside Jenny Xie ‘s poems on returning to China, Rupture Tense. You’d also enjoy Jessica J. Lee’s books, a twinned kind of call and response: Two Trees Make a Forest: Travels Among Taiwan’s Mountains & Coasts in Search of My Family’s Past as well as Lee’s memoir on swimming, Turning. Compare Lee’s: “But there’s a kind of offering in the generosity of water holding you afloat. In the way water holds feeling, how the body is most alive submerged and enveloped, there is the fullness of grace given freely.”
Similar in tone is Kyo Maclear’s Bird Art Life. Maclear describes “anticipatory grief: “I was on the lookout, scouring the horizon from every angle, for doom.”
Synaesthesia is popping up here. Another example: Powles represents pain “with a colour and corresponding verb. Emerald green gnawing. Crimson pulling.” “Werner’s Nomenclature of Colours reads like a colonial archive of colour.”
Janet Rogers, Peace in duress “Don’t believe a story that does not begin With person, place and time. This is a legacy in words archived for The future it is a grand experiment” Lillian Allen endorses Peace in duress with these words: “There’s no place to hide in the poetry of Janet Rogers…Lyrically astute, faithful, and full of fire.” These words are meant to be spoken ALOUD. On to more January Rogers books now… https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/5330220520
Robyn Sarah, Music, Late and Soon Listen to Robyn Sarah read her evocative memoir Music, Late and Soon in her mellifluous voice. Her innovative piano teacher is Phil Cohen, whose methods are marvellous. Sarah questions her choice to drop music as a career in favour of writing, teaching and family life. As a long-time student who has neglected piano for decades, I’m impressed by her later determination to play again, and play so well. https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/5266419082
Martha Schabas, My Face in the Light “My mother is an artist and I am a liar. Or, if I scratch the surface, my mother is a sick woman and I am an actress . . .” A mimic, without a centre, “a pitiable fraud”? Justine sees herself as “an outsider dropped into a system that had been desired and put together by someone else. That if I scratched the surface of my life [that metaphor again, more vividly!], my nail would pierce a flimsy laminate and poke out the other end.” Certain critical insights like Martha Schabas’s terrific opening line kept me hoping for “something acerbic and fresh that would knock [the main character, Justine] out of [her] head.” The self analysis is drawn out without real awareness. “I’d let acting wriggle its way into my life so insidiously and so completely that parts of my life and parts of my acting had become indistinguishable from each other.” https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/5316864372
Samanta Schweblin, Mouthful of birds: stories “‘They get tired of waiting and they leave you. It seems waiting wears them out.’ Felicity carefully follows the movement of a new cigarette toward the woman’s mouth, the smoke that blends with the darkness, the lips that press the cigarette. ‘So the girls cry and wait for them . . .” Nené goes on , ‘and they wait . . .’” Stories of arrivals, leaping in and out of cars https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/5251983450
Samanta Schweblin, Seven empty houses “But the abyss had opened up, and words and things were moving away at full speed, with the light, now very far from her body.” “Breath from the Depths” Stories full of boxes, the central metaphor. As if cats invented Amazon to get more cardboard boxes into the house. https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/5251978979
Namwali Serpell, The Furrows An unreliable elegy of traumatic loss. Cee begins the novel, and keeps saying, “I don’t want to tell you what happened. I want to tell you how it felt.” And she does. Cee for Cassandra: how well named! Memories repeat and collide with jarring, unpredictable scenarios. “Dear Wayne. You were moving along a groove, the one carved into the world for you. The morning was golden. The roads were as gray and smooth as the skin of sea-born creatures. At the crossroads, you were blindsided. You were as if blind and an immense force came at you from one side. As you stepped forward unaware, it came and knocked you out of your furrow and into another, plowed you up and over, put you in another place, elsewhere, where. I don’t want to tell you what happened. I want to tell you how it felt.” This force only stops at the last page. https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/5451614465
Geetanjali Shree, Tomb of Sand “she’d turn her back, she’d stick to the wall. She’d play dead, eyes and nose closed, ears shut, mouth sewn, mind numb, desires extinct; her bird had flown.”
Heidi Sopinka, Utopia A searing study in power and performative art: who is seen, what is shown, who dominates. A study in disappearing into light and heat; into falling; into black holes and event horizons; into boundaries and communication. Oh and a haunting, as in Rebecca. How far have women artists come since the 70’s? “Everyone is in position, a slight bending of vision already happening in the desert heat. The hills bleached out in their faded moth colors edging to pin, cut gem-like against the infinite blue. Paz sees the sky all around her, not just above her. The desert surroundings have become a stage.” https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/5266738839
Maria Stepanova; translated by Sasha Dugdale, In Memory of Memory: a Romance. Another fabulous book in translation from Book*hug Press. Includes so many references to her reading, in the course of a family history. As erudite as it is poetic, told by fragments “shored against our ruin” “Maria Stepanova’s profound engagement with the power and potential of memory, the mother of all muses. An exploration of the vast field between reminiscence and remembrance”
Epigraph: “And what is the use of a book,” thought Alice, “without pictures or conversations?” Lewis Carroll
“Postmemory, then is a kind of internal language, establishing horizontal and vertical lines of transmission… in which reality is transformed, changing its colours and its usual affinities….It doesn’t just show us the past but changes the present, because the past is the key to everything that occurs daily in the present.” “the landscape of memory is strewn with projections, fantasies, and misrepresentations—the ghosts of today, with their faces turned to the past.” https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/5423052782
Susan Stokes-Chapman, Pandora: A Novel “the line between coincidence and fate is very thin, Edward says” … and the line between coincidence and the final deus ex machina is thin to far stretched! But Pandora is a fun combination of historical figures and Greek legend come to life. Listening to Pandora, a novel centred around a pithos, a large urn more ancient than any Greek amphora. https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/5439677460
Diana Tamblyn and Cornelia Hoogland, A Girl Walks into the Woods Glorious graphic portrayal of Little Red Riding Hood in a comic adaptation of Cornelia Hoogland’s book, Woods Wolf Girl.
Maria Tatar, The Heroine with 1001 Faces She presents expurgated fairy tales of maidens whose hands are cut off and disempowered till rescued by their brothers, or, occasionally, themselves!
Emily Urquhart, Ordinary Wonder Tales Emily Urquhart is a marvellous writer, placing her personal story in the wider context of the legends she knows so well. A folklorist has such a different p.o.v than a poet or a Jungian… It is fascinating how “legends can be “memorate [personal narrative], fabulate [true legend], and chronicate [personal narrative not supernatural, based in fact]”.“A memory maligner invents memories for secondary gain, but a confabulator makes up the stories of their past and believes them to be true.” “It is memory that creates the peculiar, elastic properties of time” Claudia Hammond, Time Warped: Unlocking the Mysteries of Time Perception
Jennifer Wenn, Hear Through the Silence The stories of Wenn’s journey are poignant and inspiring, especially “The Transgender Anthem” and “He” in the women’s sauna but also one about being silenced in the choir! The achingly powerful voices from Birkenau call out for performance. Her imagistic haiku are lovely. https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/5314392989
Jenny Xie, The rupture tense: poems A haunting home coming, a returning rupture, erasure’s witness to change.
“That we furnish the image internally
That the sonic dimension is asynchronous
That to make is to edit, and to edit is to scramble
That memory contains no vector
That we feel most deeply in the creases between utterances”
Lindsay Zier-Vogel, Letters to Amelia: a novel Writing to Amelia Earhart, Grace knew that she needed “to be close to something that was an extension of you”: the Vespa. Earhart embodies the courage and the grit that Grace desperately craves in her own life decisions. How wonderful that Zier-Vogel itself translates to “ornamental bird”, as if in flight! Coincidence? Lovely work by Lindsay Zier-Vogel https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/5311854632
Daphne Marlatt kindly read my poem for Bob Hogg, “Reading: Bob in the Light of” at the celebration of his life at People’s Co-op in Vancouver on February 13.
Another Robert. Creeley’s voice rasps in my ear, not stuttering, not quite, but collecting space in exact precision around short lines.
The day you died, I wore by chance that fine fox pin, sleek streak of orange on red lapel—— one you
sent to celebrate FOX Haunts, the book launched when we last met.
The day before you died, I wrote, “What a body of work to be enjoyed for years! What a gift you and your poems and your stories are to us, your friends and all of Can Lit!”
In a time of loss and transition, I read instead of writing or editing. A book is so contained with its beginning, middle, and end. Covers we can close with a sense of accomplishment and of completion.
Yes, I read quickly! And yes, books are my refuge. I read instead of grieve…and I read instead of write… or do the dishes😊. I’m a proud librocubicularist: a person who reads in bed. Audio books are included in the list, as I often listen and then read the same book to catch up. . My list is sometimes annotated with quotes and includes the very occasional film. Almost all these books are in the beloved London Library, so if your book isn’t below, ask the Library to order it! Themes include reflections on the natural world, on witchcraft, and ancient mythology. And 31 books of poetry for August cap off my list!
“Though reading is a solitary act requiring privacy and quiet, I feel bound to other readers by an invisible thread of words, a kinship without speech.” Kathleen Winter, Lost in September
The Books
Angie Abdou, This One Wild Life: A Mother-Daughter Wilderness Memoir. In her dedication, Angie Abdou hopes the reader will receive the book like a long letter from a good friend. And it is: a sweet, endearing, sometimes heart-breakingly honest memoir. But earlier, the price of being so open was a devastating social media attack: Abdou describes the effects in this memoir of healing. We learn what it is what Abdou plans to do with her “one wild and precious life”. During the Pandemic, it’s a lovely treat to hike in the mountains vicariously with her. And oh, I loved her cottonwood!
Kate Atkinson, Shrines of Gaiety “There was no money in poetry; it is the wasteland of literature.” A fine romp, more like her detective fiction than her metaphysical traipsing through many lives: none of that here! A hedonic product.
John Banville, The Singularities What a superb stylist John Banville is. I relished his latest, The Singularities, just for the elegant writing. Yes, another grand country house, but so well done. John Banville is Prospero writing this metaphysical meta-circus of a novel, a “tease of Luciferion dedication and inventiveness”. Two words to look up in one sentence, hmmm: “so intense seemed the reality, the—what is the word?—the haecceity, of the places and objects he encountered, and so palpable his presence among them… as alive as life itself, out stravaging the freedom of the fields”. John Banville wears this extensive vocab. jauntily as he stravages along.
Russell Banks, Foregone: a novel “to return to your origins, you first have to die. You are born and fill your lungs with the earth’s air, and then you are free to flee. Your entire life becomes a tale of abandonment and flight right up to the end of it, when you are finally allowed to return to where you took that first breath. To where your memories started being born.” Reading two elder male writers, both superb stylists: life review novels by Russell Banks, Foregone: a novel, and Ian McEwan’s Lessons. But the wife in each book, though ostensibly essential, is a cipher with few lines and fewer lineaments to her character, despite her work being portrayed by the husband as better than his. Taking male privilege for granted: a generational assumption to be outmoded? I hope so. “He perceived pure being in all things… And in the being of being he perceived his own.” “so intense seemed the reality, the—what is the word?—the haecceity, of the places and objects he encountered, and so palpable his presence among them… as alive as life itself, out stravaging the freedom of the fields”
Matt Bell, Refuse to be done: how to write and rewrite a novel in three drafts “One thing to fix in the morning” “you must switch your allegiance from the triggering subject to the words” -Richard Hugo, The Triggering Town
Claire-Louise Bennett, Checkout 19 Consciousness talks to itself, confirms, denies, digresses and replies. Not to be read for plot but for language: her copious lists, a poetry reel spinning wherever the words lead, by sound as much as sense. A book in love with the physical act of reading and writing. “blazing through the furrows of anyone else’s mind in order to dazzle the intimate blackness at its core into rapid extinction.” “there might have been a sentence, just one sentence, of such transcendent brilliance it could have blown the world away.” “the quickening revolutions of my supremely aberrant imaginings.”
Jill Bialosky, The deceptions: a novel Jill Bialosky’s new novel is deceptive indeed. Does the male-dominated world of the ancient gods confirm her sense that men have always controlled everything? “The chorus intervenes: What if women no longer desire to satisfy the privileges of what the patriarch has built? They’ve been telling and writing the same stories for centuries. What if a new story begins with gentleness, negotiation, intuition, femininity, how would the dynamic shift?” As transference figures, the Greek gods express her own feelings: they “deploy tricks to get what they want.” “When I compare my narrator’s woes to Heracles, I am half laughing, “and yet that’s how she’s feeling as she considers the male appropriation of women’s work across history. This theme manifests in the novel’s complex twists and turns of plot. At the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the narrator says, “I know I’ll find the answers if I don’t give up.” “Athena, looking sternly. You must rewrite the story, she says.” “Does he not know that my mind spins and spins with nowhere sensible to land?” Jill Bialosky writes, “I turn to poems when I want to push the limits of language and bring alive the unconscious. Prose is more fluid.” She cites Hope Mirrlee’s experimental Paris: A Poem, 1920, published before The Wasteland, 1922!
Natasha Brown, Assembly Rachel Cusk, Sheila Heti and Bernardine Evaristo walk into a bar… and meet Natasha Brown. Assembly is honed stiletto-sharp, not a hair out of place, however the protagonist feels in classist, racist England. “Unfair”, whine the various white men who confront her in this short, perfect novel.
Sharon Butala, This Strange Visible Air: Essays on Aging and the Writing Life. Always brave, honest and necessary writing.
Ada Calhoun, Also a Poet: Frank O’Hara, My Father, and Me Who is “Also a Poet”? Calhoun’s father, art critic (and poet Peter Schjeldahl. Her memoir twists upright out of a failed biography or two of Frank O’Hara. I knew Bill Berkson, protégé of Frank O’Hara and Larry Rivers, wild man. Met Edward Gorey lurking in The Gotham Book Mart!
Julia Cameron, Seeking wisdom: a spiritual path to creative connection: a six-week artist’s way program Write a question. Write an answer. Write yourself a letter from your god(s). If god had no limits, I’d ask help with… “Unfold your own myth.” Rumi Writing from a spirit of service, her writing took off.
Jane Campion’s THE POWER OF THE DOG Cumberbatch! THE POWER OF THE DOG was spectacular, a marvel. I don’t feel visually competent to grasp at one viewing all the nuances, and I seldom watch anything twice… so I was glad to hear director Jane Campion discuss the film with women choreographer and actor, and the composer. Truly wonderful how the landscape, the sound, the costumes all feed one another.
Clare Chambers, Small pleasures: a novel. So many charming pleasures: beautiful writing, engaging characters and utterly engaging plot. A delicious read and reprieve from current events.
Mona Chollet, In Defense of Witches: The Legacy of the Witch Hunts and Why Women Are Still on Trial “Marguerite Porete—a beguine from Hainaut who, in 1310, was burned for heresy in the Place de Greve, in front of Paris’s town hall—rang the death knell of the tolerance these women had enjoyed, for they were increasingly ill appreciated due to their ‘double rejection of obedience, to both Church and husband.’” Feminist Matilda Joslyn Gage “inspired the character of Glinda, the good witch in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, which was written by her son-on-law, L. Frank Baum.”
Leonard Cohen; edited by Alexandra Pleshoyano, A ballet of lepers: a novel and stories More than juvenilia, less than the poems.
Stephen Collis, A history of the theories of rain: poems Superb “Notes on the Derangement of Time” “Thinkers understanding the universe liken rain to eloquence” “I feel the depth in the name of things”
Diane Cook, The new wilderness: a novel How would we adapt to wilderness? And our kids?
Guillermo del Toro, Nightmare Alley Nightmare Alley disturbed my dreams and my sleep with its unrelenting neo-noir inquiry into parent child love/hate, leaning toward hate in brilliant Art Deco geometries and ancient Greek nemesis. My son worked on the set up for scenes in Ontario so I had to watch…
Carrie Lee Connel, Written In Situ: poems Poems in honour of Artists’ models in “The Rossetti Suite”.
Jaclyn Desforges, Danger flower: poems The poems ricocheted, reverberated, resonated. “Thank you so much, Penn! That makes me so happy especially coming from you! I appreciate your kind words so much.”
Dave Eggers, The every: a novel Ironic to post a rating on “an ecommerce behemoth named after a South American jungle”. You can only buy THE EVERY from indie stores (in English, in hardcover). But now the paperback is available from Amazon… How to push a behemoth off a cliff. Fun, febrile, fertile and frightening, if a tad too fat a book.
Oddný Eir; translated by Philip Roughton, Land of love and ruins I’ve been reading about the Irish monks in Iceland who were chased out by Vikings… and the Celtic women slaves the Vikings brought in! Ah, the Irish diaspora: here I am:)
Hans Magnus Enzensberger; translated by Reinhold Grimm, Lighter than air: moral poemsMouthed the words in German alongside the English translation: FUN! “With her thimble she gropes for the holes of the world and keep mending and mending.” “The Great Goddess” Love the sound of the German rolling around my mouth: Fingerhut! So visceral and specific. “Mit ihrem Fingerhut tastet sie nach den Löchern der Welt und flict und flict.” “Die Große Göttin”
Louise Erdrich, The Sentence Louise Erdrich herself reads the audiobook in a delicious rendition as funny as it is powerfully poignant. And the novel includes a bookseller called Louise! A ghost story that starts on Halloween 2019 and progresses through that annus horribilis till Halloween 2020: one long sentence of the present. Glorious!
Annie Ernaux, A Girl’s Story “I am her ghost, I inhabit her vanished being.”
Elena Ferrante, In the Margins: On the Pleasures of Reading and Writing, translated by Ann Goldstein, Europa Ferrante quotes Emily Dickinson: “Witchcraft was hung, in History, But History and I Find all the Witchcraft that we need Around us, every Day -“ “The writer has no name. She is pure sensibility that feeds on the alphabet and produces an alphabet within an uncontainable flow.” “What we call ‘inner life’ is a permanent flashing in the brain that wants to take shape as voice, as writing.” “As Eckhart in his writings absorbs the experience of the Beguines, so Dante could have reinvented Beatrice poetically by looking at the scholarly women who were commenting on the Scriptures [like] Mechthild OF Magdeburg, Hildegard of Bingen, Juliana of Norwich, Margherita Porete, and Angela da Foligno, magistra theologorum. He does it naturally by bestowing on a female figure scientific, mystical knowledge… in that inleaiarsi, so to speak, entering into becoming her—he ventures to imagine, with his mystic-leaning rationalism, with his visionary realism, what is possible for women.”
Cal Flyn, Islands of abandonment: nature rebounding in the post-human landscape Conjuring Mary Shelley’s The Last Man and J.G Ballard’s The Drowned World in eschatological disanthropic stories where nature regenerates in sites to perilous for humans. And so, the last dream of the year after reading Cal Flyn’s Islands of abandonment: December 31, 2022: This California desert refuge is hidden from all comers but the solitary man who lives among the ruins of a deserted town, poisoned by pesticide and salt calcification. Except that the one man who also knows the route in is now leading another guy to the place. Wheeling marks obliterate the track, but the two men keep on trekking, wearing broad brown hats to ward off the sun. The desert bird frantically wheels about, its huge wingspan stirring up dust to hide the trail, to no avail. And on the outskirts of the nearby town, outside an old age home, a group of people are dancing in a circle. When I zoom in, it’s apparent that these are the elderly in a fitness program they usually dislike. But now several white-haired women are laughing, enjoying the dance. “You are actually laughing!” one says to the other. Some of the disgruntled elders break off for freedom, intent on heading out into the desert to live the rest of their days in the abandoned ruin. What will the disgruntled hermit do now that his refuge has been discovered?
Nina George; translated by Simon Pare. The book of dreams: a novel Fond of Sam, the young synaesthete, and his perceptions,“In Persia we call the meeting of two opposites bar-khord. Bar-khord happens when two strong elements touch and something new forms… the highest bar-khord is dying. When death and life meet in dying, they create…”
Louise Gluck, Faithful and virtuous night O glory worthy of the Nobel… I wrote ‘novel’! That too. Louise Gluck, American Originality: Essays on Poetry. Essential and astonishing reading and re-reading for any poet and reader of poetry. “What remains is tone, the medium of the soul.”
Peter Godfrey-Smith’s Metazoa: animal life and the birth of the mind Delighting in natural histories like this, histories that are so preciarious now, to be treasured.
Vivian Gornick, Taking a long look: essays on culture, literature, and feminism in our time Essential sorties into our feminist past from one who was there.
Hiromi Goto x Ann Xu, Shadow life This graphic novel features a sassy old woman who lives as she chooses. Yes!
“shuddering done, no lift or fall, no, no interval, no thought, no whispering of thought, no. Noticing blends with light. Seeing is light. No trouble in the gaze even as the
gaze gazes upon stillness and is stilled. Where is the motion I know. Where. Any breeze and I’d be human again. Swirl of leaf and I’d see it again. The vacancy. The crust afloat above the thing itself. There being no further than this as-if hallucination. The hallucination of no as-if. The end. What is utterly. Is this
ancient. Is this. As if a huge pity but entirely and only made of matter. Where has motion gone—it has taken time fate need. All lies here now in the seen. Not seen as such just there entire in the laying-out of itself in the which-is. No if. That’s it. The stillness of no if. Dear friend, you cannot cross here
This is the visible world, I have seen it in this my life, by accident, just now, I have recognized it. I do not know that I will glimpse it again in this life, I assume it’s my one life, my mind roves over it all tapping, trying words, again words. The poem is built for this. To come to this limit & see in & fail. It is built for this particular
failure. This wakefulness that wipes out the waking. This muteness which is the heart of what. It is not silence. Now each wick is lit as the planet moves into the end of the visible. The spiderweb is played string by string by the sun. Waits. Error. Nothing waits.”
Adam Grant, Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don’t Know Well, yes. We know that.
Lauren Groff, Matrix: a novel “Visions are not complete until they have been set down and stepped away from, turned this way and that in the hand.” Loved this celebration of mediaeval visionary Marie of France!
Tessa Hadley, Free Love “It seemed such an abject fatality for women—to be split apart in agony, bringing forth the new generation. Males were sealed at least into their single stupid bodies, which ended, thank God, when they did. This was bound to make essential differences between the sexes.” Glorious, nuanced prose. So delicious, evocative of London, 1967. I was living there then and this book transported me back, Of course the young in the book are reading R.D. Laing… we were! David Cooper, Kingsley Hall, your cat:) Our London commune’s group psychiatrist was Morty Schatzman, who wrote SOUL MURDER: Persecution in the Family, one of the gang of three at Kingsley Hall. Those were the days, my friend:)
Matt Haig, The Comfort Book “In Tibetan the word re-dok is a portmanteau of the words rewa (hope) and dokpa (fear), acknowledging that both coexist and both stem from essentially the same thing—uncertainty.” “I cannot escape death but at least I can escape the fear of it.” Epictetus Other than a few gems, fatuous comfort.
Alexandria Hall, Field music: poems Like elephants mulling over the dead, music is a handling. Listen to the sounds of a touched thing: a body, the panpipe” “Syrinx”
Joy Harjo, Poet warrior: a memoir In these quotes, you can experience her voice directly as written: “And the voice kept going, and Poet Warrior kept following no matter Her restless life in the chaos of the story field.”“Every day is a reenactment of the creation story. We emerge from dense unspeakable material, through the shimmering power of dreaming stuff. This is the first world, and the last.”“The imagining needs praise as does any living thing. We are evidence of this praise.”“When you talk with the dead You can only go as far as the edge of the bank.” “Frog in a Dry River”
Frank Herbert; with an introduction by Brian Herbert, Chapterhouse: Dune What a Buddhist take on the multiworld realities of Dune: like the past lives available to Tulkus; leaping through the Bardos. Cf. Read just after Buddhist George Saunders’s wild Liberation Day. “Paired opposites define your longings and those longings imprison you.” The Zensunni Whip.
Sheila Heti, Pure Colour The protagonist Mira’s name means Look! in Spanish, and Pure Colour is perception incarnate, phrase by beautiful phrase. This so deserved its GG! One of my very FAVES.
Charlotte Higgins, Greek Myths: A New Retelling You know: Euterpe, lyric verse. Erato, love songs. Calliope, epic verse. And the Winds Boreas north, Zephyr west, Eurus east and Notus south. She expounds upon Euripides’ Helen in Egypt while her replica made of clouds is in Troy. Wish we had 6th C. poet Stesichorus’s version. “In the old myths, weaving was women’s speech, women’s language, women’s story”. Carolyn Heilbrun, “What Was Penelope Unweaving?” “Earth, sea and sky as three dissimilar elements that are texta, woven together. Texere is related to the Greek verb tikto, which means to engender, to bring about, to produce, to give birth to… related to the Sanskrit takman, child, and taksh, to make or to weave.” Lucretius, On the Nature of the Universe. “Tiresias had a daughter called Manto; her powers of prophecy, which she honed much later at Delphi,…so beautiful that poets would write them down and pass them off as their own.” As Homer took her verses. Mantis is Greek for prophet. Hence mantic and praying mantis. She was known as Daphne too. It turns out Pyramus and Thisbe is Babylonian. Her blood stained the white berries of mulberry red.
Bell Hooks, All About Love: New Visions “Love invites us to grieve for the dead as ritual of mourning and as celebration… We honor their presence by naming the legacies they leave us.”
Emma Hooper, We Should Not Be Afraid of the Sky More fun and more inviting than a hagiography of a little known Roman saint, with hypnotic rhythms of repetition that are almost musical.
Susan Juby, Mindful of Murder Laughing & loving this Buddhist butler mystery:) & more to come. A novel based on Hollyhock, Cortes Island BC. And a series to follow! I want to BE Helen: more scrutable than Jeeves:): a sequel to Helen: yes!
Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead “It’s in vain to recall the past, unless it works some influence upon the present.” Charles Dickens, David Copperfield. Epigraph in Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead
Amitava Kumar, A time outside this time Oddly titled, as this novel is so much of its time, ours, just passed. More of an extended essay than a novel, but relevant; it holds the reader’s interest in its examination of fake news. In Orwell’s 1984, Winston Smith “remembers the past, which has been obliterated. A time outside this time. Is that why readers went looking for 1984 after Trump was elected? Literature as an expression of a tiny will to freedom.”
Yorgos Lanthimos, The Killing of the Sacred Deer October 31, 2022: How fitting a dream for this autumn quarter day! For several days now, Gavin and I have eaten at a Greek restaurant downtown. This morning, he drops me off outside the place so I can order the meal while he returns home in our blue VW to collect whatever he forgot. Looking into the restaurant, we notice that the sun fills the open back door with intense rays all the way east through the entire town. How remarkable! But, I learn, the restaurant doesn’t open for meals until 5:30. When I enter, the mustachioed beefy owner greets me more quizzically than warmly. Sitting down, I understand why. Sex videos to a full house, this early in the day! On stage, a man and woman are kissing enthusiastically and expertly, the image enlarged behind them on screen. Though at first I think it’s a video, the couple bow to their enthusiastic audience after the exhibition. The owner’s young daughter comes down the rows with her little sister to present me with the Halloween gift of seventy-five cents in change, as a thank-you; I don’t know for what, but we smile lovingly at one another. My gift to the owner is the knowledge that his place is in direct alignment to the rising sun at the Equinox. For sure, it’s the morning sun in the autumn. Though he’s not unduly impressed, he asks me to write a concise note that he can use as a plaque to attract tourists. A difficult process, to condense and clarify my description: no metaphors! The daughter is from Yorgos Lanthimos’s The Killing of the Sacred Deer. She presented an essay on Iphigenia to her class! Cf. Euripides’s Iphigenia in Aulis. Her plea to be the one sacrificed and her mother’s suggestion that they could always have more children reminded me of the grisly pleas of Ugolini’s children starving in Dante’s Inferno: eat us, father, for you have given us life and can take it away.
Clarice Lispector, An apprenticeship, or, The book of pleasures; translated from the Portuguese by Stefan Tobler; afterword by Sheila Heti; edited by Benjamin Moser “arithmetic came form ‘arithmos’ which means rhythm, that number came from ‘nomos’ which means ‘law’ or ‘norm’” “the great freedom of not having ways or forms” “in this dream-glimmer state that she dreamt seeing that the fruit of the world was hers… hanging in the dark space”
D.A. Lockhart. Go down Odawa way. Kegedonce Press “Shemu Sipu” for Deshkan Ziibi “the first gift of creation is the turtle shell we tread upon. Water the certain cut of motion on this land, the divine that leads us ashore, to places life finds us.”
Wonderful onomatopoeia in the Lenape Southern Unami Dialect (ul) Nishnabemowin (Nish) asukwkana songs (ul) awenik people (ul) awentetak little people(ul) chikenemwi turkey (ul) chiskukus (ul) robin chulensak birds (ul) gaagaaglishib cormorant (nish) kwikwinem duck (ul) maxkalaniat red-tailed hawk (ul) neneskakw red bud tree(ul) winkimakwsko sweet grass (ul) nushemakw willow (ul) waawaashkeshi white-tailed deer(ul) Waawiiyaatanong I loved puzzling out the Lenape Southern Unami Dialect words for creatures of this land, often onomatopeic: chulensak birds (ul) gaagaaglishib cormorant (nish) I thought you’d like his poem for our “Thames”, the Antler River, the Askinassippi: “Shemu Sipu” for Deshkan Ziibi “the first gift of creation is the turtle shell we tread upon. Water the certain cut of motion on this land, the divine that leads us ashore, to places life finds us.”
Barry Lopez, Embrace Fearlessly the Burning World: Essays “It is as though the act of concentration itself draws out something latent, or, if time becomes a dimension like width, something that was there all along.” “geography was making its way back into history” “the land’s guiding specificity” “When an observer doesn’t immediately turn what his senses convey to him into language, into the vocabulary and syntactical framework we all employ when trying to define our experiences,” “remain in a state of suspended mental analysis while observing all that was happening—resisting the urge to define or summarize. To step away from the familiar compulsion to understand… Indigenous people observe. They pay more attention to patterns in what they encounter than to isolated objects.” “a verb, the gerund ‘bearing.’” “to prefer to live a metaphorical life—that is, to think abstract problems through on several planes at the same time, to stay alert for symbolic and allegorical meanings” “If I simply accept my limitations and push on with the research, I frequently find that the disparate pieces self-sort and come together on their own, merging like iron filings” “I gravitate toward environments of uncertainty like this—the intersection of cultural and physical geography” “I continued to rely to believe, too, in the immanence of the Blessed Mother… a female bodhisattva… the Black Madonna”
Jeanette Lynes, The Apothecary’s Garden: A Novel For sweet literary Romance, I’m enjoying The Apothecary’s Garden: A Novel by the fire. Something between Jane Urquhart and Helen Humphreys: not my usual cuppa, but perfect comfort fare. Glad to have outside complete, whew, and to be cozy. A fine literary Romance devoted and dedicated to Common Magic!
Ann-Marie MacDonald, Fayne “Hermione looks around the unfriendly room, she glimpses a girl with eyes like “star sapphires”—the hypnotic Fayne Rabb. With our heroine’s identity split into shards by her academic failure, her lover George back from Europe, and Fayne’s eyes “slanting rain blue” in her direction, the stage is set for a debate between heterosexuality and mystical erotic sisterhood.” From H.D., HERmione: Frances Gregg and Ezra Pound https://www.newyorker.com/books/under-review/hds-art-of-failure? Fain: willingly under the circumstances. Lord Randall.
Alexander MacLeod, Animal Person On a glorious afternoon, strolled down to Gibbons Park in London, read Animal Person, story to story from park bench to park bench all the way home:)! Didn’t arrive back till 6 pm. Sweet! Came across clusters of Concord grapes, so am making juice. I love how MacLeod takes the specifics of a story and reaches an abstract in the last sentence.
Hilary Mantel, Learning to Talk: Stories Hilary Mantel describes Learning to Talk: Stories as “autoscopic. From a distant, elevated perspective, my writing self is looking down at a boy reduced to a shell, waiting to be fleshed out by phrases. Its outlines approximate mine, but there is a penumbra for negotiation.” “words are not enough; my early world was synesthetic, and I am haunted by the ghosts of my own sense impressions, which reemerge when I try to write, and shiver between the lines.”“But if we want to meet the dead looking alive, we turn to art. There is a poem by WH Auden, called ‘As I Walked Out One Evening’: The glacier knocks in the cupboard The desert sighs in the bed And the crack in the teacup opens A lane to the land of the dead The purpose of my first lecture is to ask if this lane is two-way street. In imagination, we chase the dead, shouting, ‘Come back!’ We may suspect that the voices we hear are an echo of our own, and the movement we see is our own shadow. But we sense the dead have a vital force still – they have something to tell us, something we need to understand. Using fiction and drama, we try to gain that understanding. In these talks, I hope to show there are techniques we can use. I don’t claim we can hear the past or see it. But I say we can listen and look.” https://www.cbc.ca/radio/ideas/what-wisdom-do-the-dead-offer-us-the-reith-lectures-by-hilary-mantel- “When you turn and look back down the years, you glimpse the ghosts of other lives you might have led; all houses are haunted.” Hilary Mantel, Giving Up the Ghost “Is this my life, or my neighbour’s conflated with mine, or a life I have dreamed & prayed for; is this my essence, twisting into a taper’s flame, or have I slipped the limits of myself—slipped into eternity, like honey from a spoon?” Hilary Mantel
Stephen Marche, The Next Civil War: Dispatches from the American Future 2022 Not to read alone in bed at night. Truly scary and scarily too true.
Anna Maxymiw, Minique A girl with synesthesia in !7th C. Montréal: to be read alongside Danielle Daniel’s Daughters of the Deer, Mona Chollet’s In Defense of Witches: The Legacy of the Witch Hunts and Why Women Are Still on Trial and Rivka Galchen’s Everyone Knows Your Mother is a Witch. AND Kathleen Winter’s marvellous Lost in September. Innkeeper/herbalist Anne Lamarque and her grimoire also feature in the new Louise Penny, A World of Curiosities where she was tried for witchcraft in 17th C. Montréal! Coincidence? A plethora of witches this year!
Elizabeth McCracken, The Hero of This Book The Hero of This Book for me was not Elizabeth McCracken’s ostensible hero, her mother, but McCracken’s lucid, pellucid style, especially her notes on writing. Her play between genres presents us with oxymorons: the novel reads like the memoir she denies it is. “Why are you writing about me? Because otherwise you’d evanesce, and that I cannot bear.”
Judith McCormack, The Singing Forest “They should have known something, of course. They did know. They didn’t know.” Why haven’t we all been reading Judith McCormack’s all too relevant The Singing Forest from Biblioasis? Blurbs by Kim Echlin, Shaena Lambert & Caroline Adderson Caroline Adderson enticed me. Her prose held me throughout even the most terrible events.
Ian McEwan, Lessons Lessons ranges throughout the trajectory of a century and the lives of Roland and Alissa, who becomes a novelist at great cost. What counts, writing or family? She, determined and ruthless; he drifting and passive. The committed writer leaves motherhood behind: genius and/or monster. The granddaughter, Stephanie, is Evangeline. “The temptation of the old, born into the middle of things, was to see in their deaths the end of everything, the end of times. That way their deaths made more sense.” Reading two elder male writers, both superb stylists: life review novels by Russell Banks, Foregone: a novel, and Ian McEwan’s Lessons. But the wife in each book, though ostensibly essential, is a cipher with few lines and fewer lineaments to her character, despite her work being portrayed by the husband as better than his. Taking male privilege for granted: a generational assumption to be outmoded? I hope so.
Stephen Mitchell, Joseph and the way of forgiveness: a biblical tale retold Loved this by Byron Katie’s husband. “How do you honestly and deeply ‘interpret’ a dream? By dreaming onward.” Thomas Moore
Melody Moezzi, The Rumi prescription: how an ancient mystic poet changed my modern manic life “Through the song of the nightingale you may learn to compose, You still can’t know what it sings to the rose.” “You’re like a pearl asking where the ocean lies, All the while soaking in its tides.” “Listen to how the reed flute sings its song, Lamenting a separation gone on too long.” Rumi, Masnavi Molana: our master Another interesting twist on memoir, incorporating all she learns from her father and Rumi: Molana: our master.
Sy Montgomery, The Hummingbirds’ Gift Raising abandoned chicks and releasing them into the wild! Sy Montgomery, The hawk’s way: encounters with fierce beauty Ah to find one’s inner hawk: that ferocious focus! Sy Montgomery, The soul of an octopus: a surprising exploration into the wonder of consciousness Listening to Sy Montgomery read, her enthusiasm is contagious.
Lisa Moore, THIS IS HOW WE LOVE Difficult to read only because the characters are so well-drawn and the writing so superb, yet their situation is harrowing and poignant Moore never holds back. The characters have their own voices: the painter’s is painterly! And oh that Newfoundland weather: a song against so many storms, literal and emotional. A perfect House of Anansi book.
Virginia Morell, Animal Wise Also depicts animal consciousness: so many interesting new studies in animal perception!
Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Song of the Cell “Mukherjee employs the literary equivalent of a massive zoom lens, both tracing the history of physicians and scientists who parsed living beings into ever-smaller constituents … and then zooming out to the paradigm shifts in our understanding of ourselves that this knowledge required.” Vincent Lam
Azar Nafisi, Read Dangerously: the Subversive Power of Literature in Trouble Times “the root of word in Arabic comes from another word: wound.”
Kristen Nef, Fierce Self-Compassion: How Women Can Harness Kindness to Speak Up, Claim Their Power, and Thrive. My Inner Critic transforms to Inner Compassion when ‘they’ are awarded a gold star for good work through the decades and promoted to Inner Compassion😊 What a relief into more spaciousness, fuller breath!
Maggie Nelson, On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint. How apt and appropriate to read Maggie Nelson’s lucid On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint these days when the definition of Freedom has escaped all known boundaries.
Claire North, Ithaca (The Songs of Penelope, #1) An opinionated re-telling of The Penelopiad from Hera’s encompassing perspective: “Listen to my voice: I who have been stripped of honour, of power and of that fire that should be mine, I who have nothing to lose that the poets have not already taken from me, only I will tell you the truth. I, who part the veil of time, will tell those stories that only the women tell. So follow me to the western isles, to the halls of Odysseus, and listen.” I couldn’t resist such an invitation and Claire North followed through.
Michelle Obama, The Light We Carry: overcoming in uncertain times December 9, 2022: Flying home from Washington, I take the direct route to Vancouver over to Toronto and then London, rather than stopping over in Chicago. This way I beat the others and am able to retrieve my things from the locker before they arrive to check. While listening to Michelle Obama read her new book.
Louise Penny, A World of Curiosities #18 is the most rewarding in the series, as Penny was a CBC journalist reporting the 1989 murder of 14 women in Montréal killed because they were women. In Minique, Anna Maxymiw develops even further the historical herbalist/innkeeper, Anne Lamarque, who was tried for witchcraft in 17th C. Montréal.
Tom Prime, Mouthfuls of space “I was a small town— almost happy”: poems of dissociation and surreal dislocations.
Colm Tóibín, Vinegar Hill “Orpheus will go to the cliff And call the dead to come To us from the sea where They have been swimming. ”
Molly Peacock, Mary Hiester Reid Paints, Travels, Marries & Opens a Door. A lovely study of painters and painting. Tonalists “connected light both to emotions—and to the sounds of emotions. Using musical vocabulary, like nocturne or symphony, they suggested that emotions could be heard through paint”. “tap into childhood to find the ‘transitional object;” as D.W. Winnicott calls it: “‘Our first adventures into reality are through the objects” with “vitality or reality of its own.”
E. Alex Pierce, To float, to drown, to close up, to open How I hear Daphne Marlatt’s rhythms, her influence, especially in the first poem: “where the great artery rises and crosses, coming so close to the larynx, the lynx in larynx, the animal voice in his first low growl” The first section opens whole areas of consciousness that I haven’t seen articulated before: truly transforming in its in/sight! It turns out we’re close in age as well: I was born in 1944: war babies. “And in that space of summer afternoon, the image born of sound and light inhabits all her blood and bone, the mind ignites. See sees the fire—space for her is stage now, theatre is the flame” Yes, to context, though context for me is the nest for the fledgline (I meant fledgling!) and in prose. The gift wrapping round the jewel, nugget, pearl of the poem. Daphne Marlatt’s long rhythms underscore the first pages. Imagine reading this book (again) along with Jorie Graham, Runaway: new poems! Especially, “WHEREAS AS I HAD NOT YET IN THIS LIFE SEEN” stillness. Stillness in time. Rich concentrate. Late summer late-day light.” Seeing into the space of light. of sound…! I so identified with Pierce’s piano pieces: I got to Gr. 9 and gave up… I could never keep time but was ‘expressive”:) much to the nuns’ chagrin… Those Preludes, though! That war haunts us war babies, conceived in such chaotic times and imprinted as a lurking shadow. E. Alex Pierce’s Vox humana awaits me soon.
Sarah Polley, Run Towards the Danger: Confrontations with a Body of Memory Dr. Mark Collins: “When patients have vestibular dysfunction, the same parts of the brain that control emotional functioning get affected… an autonomic reaction where their heart rate increases and they develop anxiety” circular feedback, f;lux.
Clare Pollard, Delphi What I’d like to remember: “Stichomancy: Prophecy by Lines Chosen at Random” “In the second century AD, Artemidorus, a Greek physician who lived in Rome, wrote that there were two classes of dreams: the somnium, which forecast events, and the insomnium, which are concerned with present matters. His Oneirocritica (Interpretation of Dreams) is a dream dictionary.“ The Sibylline Books, oracular prophecies “bought from the Sibyl at Cumae by the last king of Rome, Tarquin” John Dee “advocated for the founding of English colonies in the New World to form a ‘British Empire,’ a term he coined.” “a triad of sisters called the Thriae, with heads like aged women’s, besprinkled as if with white pollen, and the lower bodies and wings of bees… buzzing with gossip, nectar-eaters, swarming, the potential to sting. They were nymphs of the springs of the Corycian Cave of Mount Parnassus. Pan’s cave” at Delphi “the tragic hero has a moment of anagnorisis. A change from ignorance to awareness.” Accelerationists “want the digital and the human to merge. They call that the Singularity” Patternists. Human “patterns will be transferred into robots” Barbarian, from the Greek barbaroi: babbler, an onomatopoeic word for foreigners whose words sound like” burbling.
Justin Phillip Reed, The malevolent volume “I am the kind of cautionary poem that no one anymore has the peacetime to memorize. In my marrow screams a horse- drawn savage. I was loved, to make matters worse.” “The Whiteness of Achilles” “We are the dead. We set the tone death. We climb their sleep like bellflower horns, and blow.” “If We Must Be the Dead” “I sleep in the wilderness of my losses.” “The idyll was a metropole of violence. Verses from the vantagepoint of frost were purely blank, not free.” “the lazy laryngeal runnel” Astonished by Justin Phillip Reed’s The malevolent volume: the beauty in horror, dismembered by memory.
Kim Stanley Robinson, New York 2140 Well, a mixed bag because of so much necessary but heavy-handed messaging, even though I agreed with the author. Ideas in action don’t necessarily make for a compelling read. I did learn more about economics and trading than I thought I wanted to. Quibble: the kids easily read the epitaph on a tombstone near Melville’s grave, but only learn to read some hundreds of pages further on. “an availability heuristic. You think what you see is the totality.” “We’ve got to hijack speech. Creating has always been something different from communication. The key thing may be to create vacuoles of noncommunication, circuit breakers, so we can elude control.” Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations
Stuart Ross, You exist, details follow: poems “Love me. Tender my loins. Through all this, a life wandered.”
Yusuf Saadi, Pluviophile You don’t have to love rain to enjoy “The Place Words Go To Die”: “Primifluous was there and wandered murk-eyed /in the river’s bones” … flowing first, doncha know. Saadi lives inside words, as in: “Strange how we retain pieces of language, the way Yeats holds terrible for me, as in terrible beauty, or Rumi beloved for you, as in beloved let me enter.”” And in “Is the Afterlife Lonely Too?”: “…do the dead hide inside poems, in the corridor between stanzas, curling fetal In a b’s womb? (Are you here, now?) When the dead speak do words signify perfectly with presence?”
Samanta Schweblin, in Seven Empty Houses “I fished for the paper in my pocket, put it in my mouth, and as I swallowed it I repeated his name in silence, several times, so I would never forget it.” “An Unlucky Man”
Elif Shafak, The island of missing trees Features a wise old fig: “For wisdom, try a beech; for intelligence, a pine; for bravery, a rowan; for generosity, a hazel; for joy, a juniper; and for when you need to let go of what you cannot control, a birch with its silver-white bark, peeling and shedding layers like old skins.”
Shyam Selvadurai, Mansions of the Moon Dreaming August 28, 2022: Waiting to figure out what to do next, we hang out in a friend’s flat. Anne’s delicately crocheted wool scarf is wrapped around my neck as protection. We should head from Bloor St. down to the lake, walking the long blocks, passing her house. Before we set out, I realize I’ve left the scarf on the floor of the apartment. So I sneak back in to retrieve it, hoping not to be detected. Inside, poet Marvyne Jenoff has picked up the scarf, examining it closely. If Anne’s name on it, I will be incriminated. Though I think I’ve escaped without notice, Marvyne calls me out, specifically noting Anne’s telltale scarf.
The white scarf is a kata, which the Buddhist practitioner offers the teacher at the end of an empowerment as an emblem of surrendering the self to Reality. The scenes come from a novel I just read, Shyam Selvadurai’s Mansions of the Moon, about Buddha’s wife, Yaśodharā and son Rāhula. And the kata, from Lama Lena’s profound Dzogchen teachings, next:
Shabkar, The Flight of the Garuda: Dzogchen Teachings of Tibetan Buddhism. Translated by Keith Dowman. “Ordained as a Gelug monk, the itinerant yogi Shabkar was renowned for his teachings on Dzogchen, the heart practice of the Nyingma lineage.” August 27, 2022: At the conference centre, I have been asked to give an hour long talk on Dzogchen, though I am very much a beginner myself. The organizer, Ione, a small woman with short black hair and bangs, encourages me. What would Ione be short for? Something classical. When I arrive at the venue early, a few people, mainly men, have already gathered around the long table. I introduce myself and ask for their names, thinking I’d be able to remember the ten or so here. But as I begin speaking, more and more people arrive until even the balcony is filled: an audience of around a hundred. “Enlightenment is easy,” I remark.“The trick is to stay enlightened, not to be deterred by distractions. One of you might be enlightened right now. It can happen in the blink of an eye, the snap of a finger in any moment of presence. Watch!” I snap my finger, looking directly at one of the men hanging over the balcony rail. “Maybe it’s you!” He startles. “Wake up! Enlightenment is your natural birthright. All you need is to uncover and release thought. Let it go. What is behind, below your thinking, your feeling?” I continue for an hour, the audience with me, though they have had little prior experience of meditation. They shuffled out, talking among themselves, men off the street heading back. Ione comes in to congratulate me and to clean up, asking for the donation box. I’ve forgotten to ask specifically for dana, though the box is in plain sight. When Ione asks me to speak again next week, I agree, wondering if I will be paid or if all the money goes to the centre. I know most of the audience will return. I should pass the hat to ensure they donate something, even a pittance. Listening to Lama Lena’s eloquent, heartfelt Dzogchen progression of 22 talks on The Flight of the Garuda, as she elucidates the text and skillfully responds to questions. “What is behind the thinker, the perceiver? Search for yourself. Find your mind,” she exhorts, knowing that there is no ground but emptiness. “Follow the instructions,” she insists. I do. And she discusses the five Dhyani Buddhas!! https://www.learnreligions.com/the-five-dhyani-buddhas-4123189 The dharmata/dharmadatu of Nirmanakaya, Sambhogakaya and Dharmakaya. “dharmakaya is like the sun, sambhogakaya is like the rays, and nirmanakaya is like the rays hitting the objects on the earth.” The Three Bodies of Enlightenment – Lion’s Roar https://www.lionsroar.com/the-three-bodies-of-enlightenment…. “dharmadatu (chös-kyi-dbyings in Tibetan) can tentatively be translated as ‘the expanse of phenomena.’” “a Sanskrit term meaning “realm of Truth.” It is derived from the Sanskrit root words, dhatu, meaning “dimension,” “sphere’”.
Ann Shin, THE LAST EXILES: A NOVEL Her Korean heritage and history brought vividly, poignantly alive.
Daniel Siegel, Aware: The Science and Practice of Presence–A Complete Guide to the Groundbreaking Wheel of Awareness Meditation Practice: Listening to Daniel Siegel read from his book. His exploration of consciousness parallels Peter Godfrey-Smith’s Metazoa: animal life and the birth of the mindin tracing consciousness not just to the brain but to the far older nervous system. His model of the wheel, with its hub of being and the rim of thoughts and feelings is a good one.
Richard-Yves Sitoski, How to Be Human This poet has found his stride! “I am Sappho constructing an authorial persona to be revealedto Anne Carson in poems composed as fragments to begin with.” “Conclusions” “revealed to be the author writing themselves into being.” Richard-Yves Sitoski, Wait, What? Throughout Wait, What? the poet is utterly present, witnessing with exquisite, unflinching acuity his life, from conception to now. Wait, What? articulates keen perceptions on every page with finely honed lines that are an intense delight. These poems give the reader pause (often a jolt) to ponder what it is to be human. A fearless, often funny stylist, Sitoski is a poet to watch.
Elizabeth Strout, Lucy By the Sea “It’s odd how the mind does not take anything in until it can.” So engaged in the characters’ lives, I’d read on and on!
Angela Szczepaniak, The nerves centre A ten-act cast of characters: poetry in performance, poet performing! A study of anxiety, her titles from self-help with dramatis personae. My fave: Mime Heckler. Utterly uttered!
Lisa Taddeo, Animal: a novel Animal: a novel is a ferocious diatribe against male sexual violence. Since the book is dedicated to her parents and she lives with her husband and daughter, I wondered about the story behind the novel.
Miriam Toews, Fight Night Preparing for the cold last night by watching ALL MY PUNY SORROWS: such a literate, poignant and tender film based on the Toews novel! And reading , Fight Night, familiar characters: the grandmother, the girl.
Colm Tóibín, Vinegar Hill “Orpheus will go to the cliff And call the dead to come To us from the sea where They have been swimming.” Fine work, organic and very present.
Olga Tokarczuk; translated by Jennifer Croft, The books of Jacob: or, A fantastic journey across seven borders, five languages, and three major religions, not counting the minor sects. Told by the dead, supplemented by the author, drawing from a range of books, and aided by imagination, the which being the greatest natural gift of any person. That the wise might have it for a record, that my compatriots reflect, laypersons gain some understanding, and melancholy souls obtain some slight enjoyment I thought of Polish friends so often reading Polish Novel Prize novelist Olga Tokarczuk. The books of Jacob is almost 1,000 pages, so I’ve written out a quote or two about messianic Jacob Frank. To him: “The Maid is God’s wisdom hidden in a painted board like a princess in a tall On alchemy: “do not the words light (or) and infinity (Ein Sof) have the same numerical value?” And gematria. books about light: the Book of Brightness, the Gates of Light, the Light of the Eyes, “the Light of Holiness, and finally the Sefer haXohar is the Book of Splendor.” What an ending! She’s still in the cave, turning into diamond! Worth the wading.
Emily Urquhart, The Age of Creativity: Art, Memory, My Father, and Me Today, in Emily Urquhart’s The age of creativity: art, memory, my father, and me, I read: “Limitation, necessarily, inspires. Psychologist Robert Kastenbaum, whose scholarly work on death and dying redefined what we know about this stage of life, has written that creativity ‘may be the aging individual’s most profound response to the limits and uncertainties of existence.’ Facing resistance… it is human nature to invent new pathways.” “Alterstil, or ‘old-age style,’… Some cultural critics, Kenneth Clark and Edward Said among them, claim that the same old-age-style characteristics appears…as increasingly abstract, spiritual, or ethereal, and the blurring of formal and informal styles is described as a nod to eternity.” “old age is particularly difficult to assume because we have always regarded it as something alien, a foreign species: ‘Can I have become a different being while I still remain myself?’” Simone de Beauvoir, The Coming of Age
Jeff Vandermeer, Hummingbird salamander. “A dead robin in the gutter, one torn wing spread toward the drain like an invitation to the underworld.” This bird becomes a noir and naiad metaphor for the entire eco-novel’s lament for dying species and genocide in the Anthropocene. Beyond the sylvan felicity of names and family background, what connects Silvina with the Argentinian writer Silvina Ocampo? A nod to Borges, Ocampo’s friend and supporter? Jeff Vandermeer, Annhilation
Sarah Venart, I am the big heart “What I can’t lose, I’ve used.” “Chance Harbour
Paul Vermeersch; introduction by Daniel Scott Tysdal, Shared universe: new and selected poems, 1995-2020 Surrealism in colourful play and display.
Katherena Vermette, The Strangers “He’d always talk about being a Stranger like it was a good thing, like it was the opposite of what the world seemed to think it was. ‘Never forget who you are, Margogo, and who you come from. We are warriors, us. We are Métis. We have fought and won our freedom. We’ve never lived by their rules. Aren’t meant to. We have to be free.’”
Martin Walker, The Coldest Case What not to like… murder mystery and French country cuisine cooked by Bruno!
Evie Wyld, The Bass Rock A haunting chronicle of women across generations against the eerie presence of the Bass Rock that silently bears witness to thewomen’s voices.
Hanya Yanagihara, To Paradise Nicely structured fin de siècle tome, over three centuries, based on Washington Square and similarly named characters not to mention Hawaiian royalty. Deja vu, David Mitchell!
Ed Yong, An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us “Earth teems with sights and textures, sounds and vibrations, smells and tastes, electric and magnetic fields. But every animal can only tap into a small fraction of reality’s fullness. Each is enclosed within its own unique sensory bubble, perceiving but a tiny sliver of an immense world.” “The Umwelt concept can feel constrictive because it implies that every creature is trapped within the house of its senses. But to me, the idea is wonderfully expansive. It tells us that all is not as it seems and that everything we experience is but a filtered version of everything that we could experience. It reminds us that there is light in darkness, noise in silence, richness in nothingness. It hints at flickers of the unfamiliar in the familiar, of the extraordinary in the everyday, of magnificence in mundanity… When we pay attention to other animals, our own world expands and deepens.”
Zoe Whittal, The Spectacular Three generations of women negotiating current, changing times. It’s complicated, very. Spectacular, if you’re 21. I’d have liked much more from the oldest woman but it’s a long novel as is. Reminiscent of David Mitchell’s Utopia Avenue.
Gabrielle Zevin’s Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow October 20, 2022: The painting by Swedenborg is a swirl of oranges that resolve under closer scrutiny into several figures if you look closely enough. To the right, a person is in profile, looking on at two people of the same sex kissing. Would this have been a scandal too egregious to represent directly in the nineteenth century? A dream while listening toGabrielle Zevin’s Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, which depicts the image of a magic eye that reveals a hidden icon.
Anthologies Marple: Twelve New Mysteries So much fun! And older women are no longer ignored in these stories:)!
Magazines too numerous to mention!
And my fave 31 books of poetry for August! @SealeyChallenge #31BooksInAugust #31Books31Days #TheSealeyChallenge #TheSealeyChallenge2022
Day 1 Worth More Standing: Poets and Activists Pay Homage to Trees. Christine Lowther, editor. @CaitlinPress. Such an evocative, provocative essential anthology! Poets, both settler and Indigenous, pay tribute to trees through reflections on the past, connections to the present, and calls for the protection of our future.@SealeyChallenge #31BooksInAugust #TheSealeyChallenge #TheSealeyChalenge2022
Day 3 Charlie Petch, Why I Was Late “To be performed with dulcimer.” “Things You Didn’t Know about Me” Self-referential, engaging fun Performative poetry like Nerve Centre but stronger.
Day 5 Heartwood: Poems for the Love of Trees. Editor, Lesley Strutt. https://poets.ca/publications/heartwood/. This anthology continues my theme of activism through poetry to raise awareness about our threatened environment.
Day 6 Junie Désil. Eat salt/gaze at the ocean: poems “scudding back & forth through history” “There isn’t a pastness”/
Day 8 Don Mee Choi, DMZ Colony “It can take billions of years for light to reach us through the galaxies, which is to say, History is ever arriving.”
Day 9 Amanda Gorman, Call Us What We Carry “Lumen means both the cavity of an organ, literally an opening and a unit of luminous flux Literally a measurement of how lit The source is Illuminate us”.
Day 10 Richard-Yves Sitoski, No Sleep ‘til Eden. A poet to watch! Owen Sound Poet Laureate’s collection reaches out from printed word to multimedia, all for ecopoetics!
Day 11 Susan McMaster, Crossing Arcs: Alzheimer’s, My Mother, and Me Black Moss Press: poignant, powerful & funny a la fois.
My poem was originally part of Chris Meloche’s hour-long 2010 production called The Space Between: A Transmorphous Journey, at Aeolian Hall, London ON.
Penn Kemp: text and performance. Chris Meloche & Richard Moule (Transmorphous Sound Ensemble): soundscapes.
Scaling the Colour Bar: Ecophonics
Transchromaticized by love, by palette of constantly shifting grey shades, we intermittently glimpse vivid streaks, flash on the wing.
Orioles everywhere this year: bright gleams searing the sky impeccably orange and black.
A red-winged blackbird creaks like a clothesline in low gear. The creek it nests by murmurs
bubbles of possibility, ignoring frothing eddies of sodden soap for the fun of funnelling spray.
Spring’s annual utopia of hope collides with dystopian detritus, shoreline picketed by plastic.
As parallel discontinuity, planes scar the blue with contrail puffs crisscrossing innocent as cumuli.
Seemingly disparate elements catch the light and loudly soar co-mingling in cerulean expanse. * Swimming in ether, Kerouac calls, “My witness is the empty sky.” Earth responds; river replies…
“The ground that gives rise to the Word and the Word that articulates the encompassing
ground are exactly parallel.”
An early version of this poem, “Colour Bar” was published in RIVER REVERY, Insomniac Press, https://riverrevery.ca/.
Michael Morris (1942-1982) created the colour bar series I loved in the early 70’s. Where he and Mr. Peanut (Vincent Trasov) lived, in Babyland on BC’s Sunshine Coast, glorious colour bars lit up and littered the gardens: fun and an eye opener for me: Art and the land in action…
Poems in Response to Peril: An Anthology in Support of Ukraine, edited by Penn Kemp and Richard-Yves Sitoski. (Pendas Productions/Laughing Raven Press, May 2022, 121 pages). ISBN 978-1-927734-37-7
by Nick Beauchesne, PhD, MA, BA, Sessional Instructor Department of English and Modern Languages, U. of Alberta
“Canadian editors and poets Penn Kemp and Richard-Yves Sitoski have assembled 61 poems by 48 of Canada’s most prominent poets in response to the current crisis in Ukraine and other perils afflicting our troubled times.
The underlying question of this anthology is: what can poetry do in the face of such horror? The answer is complex and manifold.
As one contributor, Susan McMaster posits, “Poetry is the voice of the spaces between the words, of the heart between the beats, of the caught breath before the long exhale… Poetry hums and sings and says what can’t be said” (63). It traces the edges of the inarticulable.
In a similar exercise, Marilyn Bowering offers this glimpse into the “emptying of Mariupol,” her attempt to comprehend bombings and mass evacuations:
its people slipping on shoes, into cars, along the secret paths of their bodies. They are the silence inside missiles, and bombs. They are the silence. (25)
These lines are all the more haunting with the knowledge that they were written in March—while there was still a Mariupol to evacuate. Now, that city is little more than rubble, “destroyed completely,” as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky bluntly stated in early May.
In attempting to articulate these perils, Kemp and Sitoski affirm in the Preface that, “while this book was inspired by Ukraine, it can serve as catalyst for us to see the human tragedy of all the world’s conflicts” (xiv). Offering comfort, community, and solidarity is a beginning—not only for those suffering in Ukraine, but in Palestine, Afghanistan, Myanmar, Syria, and anywhere else gripped by terrorism and war.
Beyond solidarity, poetry can be a call to action. As Kemp later writes in one of her poems, the poetry itself, along with the too-familiar phrase, “thoughts and prayers,” need be accompanied by material support:
May Kyiv keep safe beneath the holy mantle of Maty Zemlya, Mother Earth as if prayers were enough. Send money. (48).
Profits from the book will be directed toward PEN Ukraine’s efforts to provide the Ukrainian cultural community with evacuation and resettlement help. In purchasing this striking, heartbreaking, and beautiful book, one supports not only Canadian artists, some with Ukrainian roots, but also directly helps the people affected by the Russian “special operation.” Poems in Response to Peril is a marker for these times, a resounding, polyvocal cry of “enough!” that will echo into history.”
Poems in Response to Peril: An Anthology in Support of Ukraine edited by Penn Kemp and Richard-Yves Sitoski contains 61 poems by 48 of Canada’s prominent poets. They were written in March 2022 when Putin’s military planes were dropping bombs on Ukrainians and his artillery was targeting the Ukrainian army and civilians. The book is a gesture of Canadian poets’ solidarity with the people of Ukraine, including its cultural workers and activists.
The book abounds with questions as people throughout the world are trying to digest the enormity of this crisis in Europe. Poets Yvonne Blomer, Kate Braid, Katerina Vaughan Fretwell, Karl Jirgens, Blain Marchand, Marianne Micros and Greg Santos all resort to questions in an effort to make sense of the tragedy that befell the sovereign East-European nation following the Russian attack on its soil on February 24.
What was the first thing you noticed? the wind was a hammer birds in trees were sparks the sun did nothing but cast shadows. The dog’s loose ears became sheeted ghosts (Yvonne Blomer, “Poem with Questions”)
Who are we? What do we want? Current possibilities reduce intention, trying. (Karl Jirgens, “Words of Peril in 3 Parts”)
When the thunder assaults you, you wonder if your home’s hard-won memories survive? (Katerina Vaughan Fretwell, “Kudos, Dear Ukrainians”)
As the world was watching the conflict unfold and start to affect growing numbers of civilians in Ukraine, the people sympathetic with their plight were unable to dismiss the Ukrainians’ need to survive. Several authors in the anthology depict the difficulties of those who were forced to flee their homes:
In bed at night, I listen to the emptying of Mariupol, its people slipping on shoes, into cars, along the secret paths of their bodies. (Marilyn Bowering, “Mariupol Water”)
The mothers and bundled children. The elderly in wheelchairs or hobbling with canes. Terror sketched and straining each of their faces. (Blaine Marchand, “About suffering they were never wrong”)
The anthology includes a poem by renowned Ukrainian poet Dmytro Kremin (1953-2019) with what seems like a glimpse into the future:
…The ashes of burnt fires are flying, flying down out of the sky and blocking a stereoscope. (“The Ashes of an Eyewitness”, translated by Svetlana Ischenko and Russell Thornton)
Animals belonging to their besieged owners also had to be rescued from the advancing troops:
In Ukraine, poems still spill from the wings of storks, the mythopoetic pinions of dream horses along with the whinnying of flesh and blood ones transported in trucks away from the killing fields. (Susan McCaslin, “Poetry in Times of Peril”)
The contributors to the anthology paint a picture of the fighters who resist the aggressor:
A Ukrainian man protests in front of Russian soldiers, a crack, he crumples. A grandmother armed with Googled instructions prepares Molotov cocktails in her back yard. A man climbs onto a moving Russian tank to defiantly wave a Ukrainian flag. (Jennifer Wenn, “Kaleidoscope for the Invasion of Ukraine, February 24 2022”)
The poems in the anthology range from a simple human heart’s cry in protest against harm inflicted on others (Albert Dumont, “The Tears I Shed”) to straightforward advice on what ammunition needs to be sent to the Ukrainian army (Jay Yair Brodbar, “What We Need Beyond the Pale”).
Some of the poets probe their faith in adversity. David C. Brydges invokes the story of the icon of Our Lady of Kyiv, a holy image that was commissioned for a church in Kyiv and stolen by Russian invaders in the 12th century. The Canadian poet speaks about his search for answers to the world’s problems and eventually finds comfort in the iconic image.
The poets represented in the publication condemn Putin, calling him an ‘errant madman’ (Penn Kemp, “Fast Poem for Ukraine”), a lunatic from whose despotism innocent people have to suffer. In his response to W.H. Auden’s famous adage that “poetry makes nothing happen”, Robert Girvan points out that
…war and power are not all, not the best or most important part.
When one sees a blackbird or red cardinal, they might see snowy mountains, and think of many things.
(“13ish Ways Poems Make Something Happen”)
Poems in Response to Peril is a joy to read and a reminder to all of us that a shared grief is easier to endure. The profits from it will be going to PEN Ukraine.”
Frances Roberts Reilly, Tanis MacDonald and Penn Kemp, about to read at the launch on the gorgeous Blackfriars Bistro patio. Photo: Bob Reilly
Promoting POEMS IN RESPONSE TO PERIL
April 2, 2022. Zoom, A Gathering of Poets in Response to Peril, #poetsinresponsetoperil. A 3-hour international Zoom reading, now up on YouTube > Poets in Response to Peril). The Zoom featured more than 30 of the book’s Canadian contributors, expressing solidarity with those afflicted by war: https://www.rsitoski.com/event-details/poets-in-response-to-peril for National Poetry Month. Along with host Richard-Yves Sitoski, we celebrated How Poems Matter. Why Poems Matter. This “Oh!Sound Reading” https://pennkemp.wordpress.com/2022/03/04/a-gathering-of-poets-in-response-to-peril/ was a cross-Canada marathon with 100 participants. Sponsored by the League of Canadian Poets.
April 9, 2022. “Slava Ukraini“, Summerland, BC. “It was a really good community event with music and words, including some history of Ukraine and its culture and poems Patricia Keeney sent us from a brand new anthology by Canadian poets.” Peter Hay, organizer Poems by Patricia Keeney, Penn Kemp and Daphne Marlatt were read at this fundraiser for Ukraine.
May 28 2022. Launch of Poems in Response to Peril , Blackfriars Bistro, London ON. Readings by Andreas Gripp, Penn Kemp, Tanis MacDonald, Frances Roberts Reilly, Richard-Yves Sitoski, Solo and Jennifer Wenn on the glorious Blackfriars Bistro patio.
Penn Kemp 