Grace Restaurant and Poems in Response to Peril proudly present Celebrating Ukraine: A Small Business and Artisan Market and Dinner Experience. This event will be held on Wednesday, August 23, the day before Ukrainian Independence Day.
The fundraising event will feature a daytime market from 2:00 pm-5:00 pm for Ukrainian small businesses and artists to network and sell their wares. We encourage everyone to stop by and support our newly arrived and established Ukrainian Canadian community. Ukrainian-owned businesses who are interested in participating may send inquiries to angie@gracelondon.ca.
Join us at Grace Restaurant for the Ukraine tribute dinner at 6 pm. We will serve a traditional Ukrainian cuisine-inspired menu, carefully crafted in collaboration with our Ukrainian friends to ensure authenticity and cultural integrity. Chef/owner Angela Murphy is excited to share this Ukrainian “Taste of Home”.
Poems in Response to Peril, co-edited by poets Penn Kemp and Richard-Yves Sitoski, will be featured. Nine contributing poets will read from this anthology dedicated to Ukraine, accompanied by a Ukrainian folk song played by Mary Ashton. This anthology brings together poems by some of Canada’s most prominent poets, in response to the current crisis in Ukraine and other perils afflicting our troubled times. A copy of Poems in Response to Peril will be included in the $120.00 price of the dinner. Our cheque for $3,000 from funds raised by book sales will be presented to the Aid for Artists Fund through the Canada-Ukraine Foundation.
Celebrating Ukraine is a joint effort to honour and support the Ukrainian arts, culture and people as the war rages on. Part of the proceeds from this event will be donated to the Canada-Ukraine Foundation.
Tickets can be purchased at Grace Restaurant (215 Dundas St, London, 226 667 4822) or by contacting foh@gracelondon.ca. Please join us in celebrating Ukraine!
If you’re anywhere near Toronto, I’d live to see you! Excited to be performing in collaboration with Bill Gilliam! My reading is sponsored by the League of Canadian Poets.
WELCOME to the Summer Edition of the Minstrels & Bards Soirée! In the warmth, conviviality and ease of the summer, come celebrate with us on Tuesday, July 25, 2023 in The Living Room at the Tranzac Club in Tkaronto/Toronto. Doors are open 5:45pm and we start promptly at 6pm.
We’ll enter a delightful Quantum universe of poetics and performance with our features extraordinaire, Penn Kemp, a multimedia poet whose voice is rhythm, and Bill Gilliam, a composer of experimental and new music. In guest spots, a range of innovative styles with Rocco De Giacomo, Wes Rickert, and Babar Kahn.
Penn has edited many poetry anthologies, recently Poems in Response to Peril, with Richard-Yves Sitoski in support of Ukraine: https://www.rsitoski.com/poems-in-response-to-peril and https://shepherd.com/best-books/social-justice-women-and-the-environment. For service to arts and culture, Penn received both Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee and Platinum medals. The League of Canadian Poets acclaimed her as Spoken Word Artist of the year 2015, an award for lifetime achievement, as well as a Foremother of Canadian poetry and their 40th Life Member. She is on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, SoundCloud, even MySpace. Updates: pennkemp.weebly.com, pennkemp.wordpress.com and https://pennkemp.substack.com/.
Bill Gilliam is a Toronto based composer / pianist who creates and improvises jazz and new music compositions blending contemporary harmony and jazz idioms into his unique style of acoustic and prepared piano playing. His recordings include “Outside The Maze” (2023) and “Light Through Dark” (2021) with Bill McBirnie & Eugene Martynec, “Counterstasis – Refracted Voices” (2019) with Glen Hall & Joe Sorbara, “Entangled Pathways” (2017) with the Gilliam, Milmine, Pottie trio, “Ensorcell” (2012, solo piano), “Memory Vision” (electroacoustic DVD), “Signposts” as well as “Spirit Matter” and “Urban Undercurrents” with the Bill Gilliam Ensemble.
Bill has performed and recorded with Penn Kemp and played with his different ensembles in many jazz venues and festivals. Recently he performed with his improvising trio Counterstasis and special guest Kathryn Ladano (bass clarinet) at the Open Ears Festival 2023 in Kitchener. He also released a new album “Outside The Maze” in May 2023 with Bill McBirnie (flute) & Eugene Martynec (electroacoustics).
Rocco de Giacomo lives in Toronto with his wife, Lisa Keophila, a fibre artist, and his daughters, Ava and Matilda. He is a widely published poet whose work has appeared in literary journals in Canada, Australia, England, Hong Kong and the US. The author of numerous poetry chapbooks and full-length collections, his latest, Casting Out (Guernica Editions) – on the reconciliation of the author’s secular lifestyle and their deeply Evangelical upbringing – was published in April of 2023.
Wesley Rickert is a writer, director & producer of no-budget art house films and has written & produced 5 arthouse features that defy easy categorization. Between film projects he is a performance poet, noise musician, DIY audio producer, visual artist and sculptor. His writing and sound poetry embraces the irrational, cherishes original experience and strives for personal transformation at any cost. He is a regular contributor to “Maintenant -A Journal of Contemporary Dada”, Three Rooms Press, NYC, has performed with the legendary sound poet bill bissett at the Poets House, NYC, The Players Club, NYC, & for Versefest, Ottawa. He was recently a featured reader at the Art Bar in Toronto and is the director of Liberty Manor, an informal and rural artist residency in the Thousand Islands dedicated to furthering all forms of challenging expression.
Babar Khan is a Canadian writer, poet, and art photographer who grew up partly in Paris, France and partly in Toronto. His poems have appeared in Contemporary Verse 2, Rampike, and Vallum, among others. His photographs have been exhibited at Month of Photography L.A. and on Lensculture. He has also featured multiple times over the years at the Art Bar, AvantGarden, Emerging Writers, and other reading series in Toronto.
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.
Up now, 3 poems from Incrementallly: “from Night Orchestra”, “Declination”, “Bees Needs”, Interpoem: A Visual Anthology. Editor, Laura Kerr, https://sedserio.com/about
Friday, October 2O, 2:30pm. A Painterly Poet project at the 2023 Ontario Screen Creators Short Film Pitch Competition. Robyn Israel, director. DoubleTree by Hilton, 300 King St., London ON.
Saturday, October 21, 2023, Great Lakes Odyssey. live: “On this trek of the Great Lakes Odyssey Radio Hour we examine how climate shapes and defines culture… And poetry performance by Penn Kemp with Bill Gilliam.” From “Night Orchestra” 44.42, up now https://radio.wcmu.org/show/great-lakes-od/2023-10-17/great-lakes-odyssey-october-14-2023 On October 21, 7 pm, WBFO-NPR Buffalo/Toronto airs it. October 21, 10 pm, WCMU-NPR Central/North Michigan airs it. The reach is 100,000 listeners!
Saturday, October 21, 11:00am-1:00pm. Words Aloud, Community Poetry Workshop at M’Wikwedong Indigenous Friendship Centre, Owen Sound ON. Sounding the Muse: “Calling in the Muse, sound poet Penn Kemp presents the three stages of writing a poem: invocation, expression, and communication. This workshop explores new ways of reaching the source of creativity, evoking your Muse through sound to give form to poetry. Participants will experience the innovative power of sound poetry. Through sounding, we will tap the energy and source of inspiration. Then we will explore finding language to shape the inklings of your poem. Participants will develop an abundance of ideas and images, an enhanced awareness of structure, and more ease and delight in showing or performing work.” Contact: Richard Sitoski <r_sitoski@yahoo.ca>. See https://wordsaloud.ca!
Sunday, October 22, 2023. 12:00pm-2:00pm. Performance, Words Aloud, Owen Sound ON. Main stage event, Tom Thomson Art Gallery, Owen Sound. Featuring Barry Dempster, Kim Fahner, Penn Kemp and D.A. Lockhart. Contact: Richard Sitoski <r_sitoski@yahoo.ca>. https://wordsaloud.ca
Tuesday, November 14, 2023, 7pm ET. “Heart to Art”, video for Quai Nocent Docent (What Hurts Teaches): A Collection of Poems and Musings. The Friendly Spike Theatre. Contact: sarah.wells@live.ca
Wednesday, November 15, 2023, 6:30pm to 8:00pm. Launch of the anthology, Stones Beneath the Surface. Mykonos Restaurant, 572 Adelaide St. N., London ON https://blackmallardpoetry.wixsite.com/home/books
April 29, 2024, 7pm. Art Bar, Free Times Café, 320 College Street. Toronto, ON M5T 1S3. On College w. of Markham· (416) 967-1078. Feature, artbarpoetry@gmail.com
Recent Publications 2023
“The Winter Widow i”, “The Winter Widow ii”, stones beneath the surface: a poetry anthology, pp. 44-45. https://blackmallardpoetry.wixsite.com/home/books. November, 2023.
“Weather Vane, Whether Vain, Whither and Thither” and “Black, White and Red All Over Town”: two poems in a fine press edition of the anthology, An Avian Alphabet, Barbarian Press, 2023. An Avian Alphabet. Edited by Susan McCaslin, with woodcut prints by Edith Krause.
September 21. Patricia Keeney read poems from POEMS IN RESPONSE TO PERIL for “Salute to Ukraine” at the Ryga Arts Festival, http://www.rygafest.ca, Summerland BC.
September 10, 3-5 pm. Reading Among the Alpacas“, with Penn Kemp and Robyn Israel. The Timbuktu Alpaca & Eco-Tourism Farm, 2211 Egremont Drive, RR5 Strathroy ON, N7G 3H6. Kid friendly! To register: https://www.timbuktufarm.com/. Contact Thandi, info@timbuktufarm.com. I’ll read from my plays, THE EPIC OF TOAD AND HERON and THE DREAM LIFE OF TERESA HARRIS. Sponsored by Playwrights Guild of Canada. Join us for readings of new work at Timbuktu Eco-tourism Farm as alpaca roam about! A happy, peaceful place to meet and mingle with these sweet, curious and friendly animals! Kid friendly! Sponsored by Playwrights Guild of Canada. https://www.timbuktufarm.com/event-details/reading-among-the-alpacas https://www.facebook.com/events/790127145919723/
August 16, 2023, 7:30pm. Launch of ORDERBLUR POETICS: INTERMEDIA AND AVANT-GARDISM IN CANADA, 1963-1988 (University of Calgary Press) by Eric Schmaltz. The evening will feature short readings by ERIC SCHMALTZ, BILL BISSETT, BRIAN DEDORA, PENN KEMP (virtual), PAUL DUTTON, & DANI SPINOSA. 918 Bathurst Centre for Culture, Arts, Media & Education, 918 Bathurst St, Toronto, ON
July 25, 2023, 5:45 pm-8 pm. Minstrels & Bards Summer Soirée 2023 Edition. Feature poet, with Bill Gilliam, featured musician. at The TRANZAC, 292 Brunswick Ave, Toronto, ON M5S 2M7. Host: Brenda Clews, Minstrels & Bards, minstrelsandbards@gmail.com. My reading is sponsored by the League of Canadian Poets and the Canada Council for the Arts. Among the poems performed, Bill and I will perform Night Orchestra”. You can hear an expanded version of Bill’s and my performance of the piece here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=98OEWklDcYY.
July 9, 3-5 pm. “Reading Among the Alpacas”, Feature poet, with Robyn Israel. The Timbuktu Alpaca & Eco-Tourism Farm, 2211 Egremont Drive, RR5 Strathroy ON, N7G 3H6. See https://www.timbuktufarm.com/. I read poems from Fox Haunts and A Baker’s Dozen. My reading was sponsored by the League of Canadian Poets and the Canada Council for the Arts. See https://www.facebook.com/events/580340174300919/?ref=newsfeed. E. Ruth Strebe filmed “Night Orchestra” when I was reading it with audience participation that included alpacas and…:) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Okzs9hnbvQc 1.231
Join us Thursday, April 27 for poems of joy with Penn Kemp!
The fabulous Blackfriars Bistro joyously celebrates National Poetry Month, #npm23. Come at 6pm for dinner, a drink or dessert, and stay for poems on the theme of JOY! Or come for poetry at 7pm.
Penn reads from odes to joy through the ages and her own recent poetry along with community readings and participatory sounding of odes:)! Admission is free but reservations are necessary if you are coming at 6pm: call (519) 667-4930.46 Blackfriars St, London N6H 1K7 https://blackfriarsbistro.com/. Contact Penn pennkemp@gmail.com, www.pennkemp.weebly.com.
Surprised by Joy
Blessed be here. Blessed be clever cardinals who vary their song into language only other cardinals interpret. Blessed be red squirrels who scold all intruders into silence below.
Blessed be hostas and fern, the mix of wild with cultivated. Blessed be the cultivated soil that allows for splendid fluorescence. Blessed be the breakers upon the shoal.
Blessed be hushed wing of crow and after landing on spruce branch, a raucous caw. Blessed be the interchange of story, space to be alone together. Blessed be the quiet.
Blessed be haecceity, an expanse of time. Blessed be completion. Blessed be night that covers the cottage in a moiré spread and seeps into warm dreams of possibility.
Blessed be old bare black cherry, dead in winter’s past blast but ready to turn now into fire’s best wood, slow-burning, hot. Blessed be the poets whose refrains
run through their still too busy brain, still listening, till dawn chorus bursts into joy. And celebration of the daily begins again in jubilation, in improbable hope, arising.
“Surprised By Joy” has been chosen as the League of Poet’s poem for JOY in National Poetry Month #npm23! It is featured April 28 on https://poets.ca/poetrypause/.
Adapted from “Surprised By Joy”, River Revery, by Penn Kemp, Insomniac Press. The poem is dedicated to Catherine Ross, much loved, much missed.
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!”
A map is a device for locating oneself in space. Here’s an old map of early Okanogan County. Obviously, a map also orients one in time.
Note as well, that the map has limitations. For instance, Okanogan County is a political entity. The land stretches seamlessly beyond the county’s boundaries, into Lake Chelan at southwest, deep into Colville lands to the East, into the Columbia Basin to the south and into Canada to the North, where it’s clear that maps have a message, indeed. This one (below) doesn’t even represent space accurately, and all that white snow on the horizon? Good grief. You’d think Frankenstein was wandering around out there with Franklin, or something. Obviously, these maps are stories, little different than the other stories of the culture they represent: novels, films, cartoons, that kind of thing. In truth, these cartographic representations are what novels, films and cartoons look like…
Penn Kemp 