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.
Forthcoming Reading Celebrating National Poetry Month
Thursday, April 27, 2023, 7 pm. London’s first laureate Penn Kemp reads from recent poetry, free. Come for dinner or desert and stay for poems on the theme of JOY! You need to reserve a place @ Blackfriars Bistro (519) 667-4930, 46 Blackfriars St, London, ON N6H 1K7. Contact: Penn, 519 434 8555, pennkemp@gmail.com.
Forthcoming
“Surprised By Joy” has been selected for Poetry Pause: JOY for April 28, 2023, during National Poetry Month. https://poets.ca/poetrypause/
Tuesday, July 18, 2023, 7-9 pm. Minstrels & Bards Summer Soirée 2023 Edition. With Bill Gilliam, featured musician. The Living Room at The TRANZAC, 292 Brunswick Ave, Toronto, ON M5S 2M7. Host: Brenda Clews, Minstrels & Bards, minstrelsandbards@gmail.com.
Saturday, October 21, 2023, 7:00-9:00 pm. Workshop, Words Aloud, Owen Sound ON. Sunday, October 22, 2023. Performance, Words Aloud, Owen Sound ON. The October festival will feature Kim Fahner, Penn Kemp, Janice Jo Lee, Sarah Lewis, Dan Lockhart, Stuart Ross, and Brandon Wint. Contact: Richard Sitoski <r_sitoski@yahoo.ca> See https://wordsaloud.ca!
Julian Barnes, Elizabeth Finch How can such a short novel feel so padded? The eponymous Elizabeth Finch herself, teaching her inspired course on “Culture and Civilisation”, is fascinating to our narrator. Elizabeth Finch describes the death of Julian the Apostate, the last pagan Roman emperor, as the “moment history went wrong”. Julian B’s academic essay on Julian the Apostate, stuck arbitrarily mid-section, is interesting in itself and witty enough. But Julian on Julian? The self-referential trick becomes self-indulgent. The repeated phrase, “Getting its history wrong is part of being a…” nation? Religion? The dread monoculture? So Barnes proclaims. Meanwhile, despite bequeathing all her notes to the narrator, Elizabeth Finch in death as in life evades his attempts to pin her down, and so evades the reader. 2.5
William Boyd, Love is Blind Who can deny such a pleasurable epic read four stars on a snowed-in afternoon? But who is Lika / Lydia aside from her physical attributes? We know so little of this enigmatic love interest, because she is a “Russian actress”, a term used disparagingly to explain her. Well, love is blind: and our hero Brodie can only see through his Franklin glasses, bifocal. The ethnographer Paget is much more of a well-drawn character, though she appears only first page and the last thirty, Part VII, set, bizarrely, in the Andaman Islands of 1906. ***1/2 https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/5319776289?
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
Emma Hooper, We Should Not Be Afraid of the Sky 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
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.
Laurie Lico Albanese, Hester Hester 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. 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. Nathaniel Hawthorne is… well, at best a man of his times.
Anna Maxymiw’s Minique Witches are getting quite the splash lately in novels like Hester and Anna Maxymiw’s Minique, a brilliant new book set in New France. A girl with synesthesia in 17th C Montréal! What will she become? Brilliantly unfolded, the story lingers in mind. Anne Lamarque, the witch who knows how to survive, and her grimoire also feature in the new Louise Penny, A World of Curiosities! Coincidence? Read Minique alongside Hester by Laurie Lico Albanese: another girl with synesthesia in 17th C. Scotland, from a lineage of red-haired witches. And Danielle Daniel’s Daughters of the Deer, Mona Chollet’s In Defense of Witches and Rivka Galchen’s Everyone Knows Your Mother is a Witch. https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/4776346617
Hester 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. 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. Nathaniel Hawthorne is… well, at best a man of his times. Witches are getting quite the splash lately in novels like Hester and Anna Maxymiw’s Minique, a brilliant new novel set in 17th-century New France.
Witches are getting quite the splash lately in novels like Anna Maxymiw’s Minique, a brilliant new book set in New France. A girl with synesthesia in 17th C Montréal! What will she become? Brilliantly unfolded, the story lingers in mind. Anne Lamarque, the witch who knows how to survive, and her grimoire also feature in the new Louise Penny, A World of Curiosities! Coincidence? Read Minique alongside Hester by Laurie Lico Albanese: another girl with synesthesia in 17th C. Scotland, from a lineage of red-haired witches. And Danielle Daniel’s Daughters of the Deer, Mona Chollet’s In Defense of Witches and Rivka Galchen’s Everyone Knows Your Mother is a Witch. https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/4776346617
Okezie Nwoka, God of Mercy For Black History Month and on. Magic realism and real magic in a beautifully imagined Igbo village that has not been colonized, as opposed to the next town over which has been, under the power of a fundamentalist church.
Heidi Sopinka, Utopia Heidi Sopinka’s new novel is 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…
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…
… I found it hard to compute that people were behind me, strolling with their ice creams and specialty coffees. That we are all just living here, as this is happening there.
This unsettling feeling is a recurring theme in a new Canadian poetry anthology. Poems in Response to Peril: An Anthology in Support of Ukraine was put together in less than three months by London, Ont.-based poet Penn Kemp and Richard-Yves Sitoski, who is poet laureate for Owen Sound, Ont.
In February on her blog, Kemp asked poets to respond to W.H. Auden’s famous quote (from his elegy for W.B. Yeats) that “poetry makes nothing happen.” Then she put out a call on social media. Dozens of poems came in, many of which appear in the anthology.
Some deal with that feeling of impotence, going on with life in Canada as war raged, such as Tanis MacDonald’s We lived Canadianly during the war. “We were unhappy during the war because our bandwidth was / low. Gas prices were up, and we were tired of masking,” it begins. “And when they bombed other people’s houses, we knew to / sigh and look sad.”
Kemp relates deeply to this feeling of powerlessness and frustration, but as for Auden’s provocation, she believes poetry can be an effective tool.
“It moves the heart,” she says. “And when the heart is moved, then action follows.”
The anthology’s first printing has sold out, raising about $4,000 for PEN Ukraine. A second printing is underway. Contributors have sent copies of the book to Ukrainian poets. And poets have been making videos of themselves reading their poem.
Ukrainian poet and publisher Sergiy Kuzin has translated my poem “Kind of Intimate” from POEMS IN RESPONSE TO PERIL into Ukrainian! Its title in Ukrainian is the beautiful “Touches Souls, I Suppose”. He uses the notions of “untouchable (nedoTORkany) path” vs “untrodden (neTORovany) path” to render word-play in the final stanza. A version of my poem is up on https://poets.ca/npm22-blog-penn-kemp/.
About the anthology, Kuzin writes, “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.”
Sergiy Kuzin is the founder and publisher of Zaza, an independent magazine of Ukrainian poetry and fiction. He has also translated the poetry of Brandon Melendez and Ian Burnette. He lives in the Kyiv region, in the village of Blystavytsia near Bucha.
Торкає душі, напевно
Що може торкати більше, ніж постійний потік інформації з наших екранів, образи, що залягли на потиличній частці головного мозку,
закарбувалися там назавжди? Що може торкати більше, ніж глибока любов, яка прив’язує родину, друзів та іноземні обличчя,
які ми бачимо в мережі, до відомої нам орбіти? Знаючи, що всі ми – єдиний, з багатьма кінцівками, звір, що називається людством.
З ним ви чи проти нього, але він стоятиме цілий і сам. Що може торкати більше, ніж весілля у фронтових умовах, коли наречена тримає
букет між собою і нареченим – обидва в камуфляжі, обидва готові захищатися? Коли гострий метал пронизує плоть, сталь угризається в кості.
Кровотік наповнений звуками, що засіли у коридорах розбомбленого пологового будинку,
дітьми, що залишаються під його уламками, не кажучи вже про немовлят і породіль. Що може торкати більше, ніж мить,
коли думка набирає форми завдяки ручці й паперу, пальцям і клавіатурі? Перед тим як слова постануть
і стануть на місця – священний зв’язок літер, узгоджений рух уперед, що не існував раніше, до того, як зродився
вірш? Наслідок – яскраво-червона плацента полегшення, спосіб удячності, відкритий стражданням, – за те, що залишається
щось, поки гинуть цивілізації, і цей занепад порожньо дзвенить у наших вухах. У наш час і поза ним, коли
ламаються перепони історії, те, що торкає нас сьогодні, не є недоторканим шляхом. Воно є шляхом неторованим.
Sergiy Kuzin
Kind of Intimate
What could be more intimate than constant streaming on our screens, images plastered on the occipital nerve, imprinted, planted, permanent?
What more intimate than a deep love roping in family, friends, and foreign faces on the Web to our known orbit?
In the knowledge that we are all one multi-armed huge beast we call humanity. backed for or against, wholly, alone.
What could be more intimate than a marriage under siege, the bride’s bouquet between her and him in camouflage, weapons at the ready?
A sharp pang of metal piercing flesh, the rude intrusion of steel into bone. Sounds haunting the bloodstream linger along what once were halls
of the bombed maternity hospital, children still under the walls, not to speak of infants, mothers in labour.
What more intimate than the time when thought coalesces into form between pen and paper, text onto key board? Before words arise and fall
in place, the sacred alphabet arranged just so in orderly progression that never before has taken shape, as the poem is birthed? Its aftermath, crimson placenta
of relief, grief given way to gratitude that something remains while entire civilizations collapse and fall. The fall resounding rings hollow down our ears.
In our time and beyond, throughout the barriers of history being broken, the current kind of intimate intimidates us not into submission—but to action.
See Penn Kemp’s video reading, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VhDPMd4iqlI&t=4s. This poem was commissioned by the League of Canadian Poets for National Poetry Month 2022 on the theme of Poetry and Intimacy.
The anthology is available for $30 plus post from Richard-Yves Sitoski, r_sitoski@yahoo.ca
Please join us tomorrow for a breath of fresh air, a breath of poetry and SPRING!
Host: Jennifer Chesnut, Environmentalist-in-Residence, London Public Library.
With special guest Penn Kemp, explore poems on the theme of Earth and create your own eco-poem. This reading and workshop is open for all levels of experience zoom.
Penn Kemp has been celebrated as a trailblazer since her first publication (Coach House, 1972). She was London Ontario’s inaugural Poet Laureate and Western University’s Writer-in- Residence. Chosen as the League of Canadian Poets’ Spoken Word Artist (2015), Kemp has long been a keen participant in Canada’s cultural life, with thirty books of poetry, prose and drama; seven plays and multimedia galore. See http://www.pennkemp.wordpress.com, www.pennkemp.weebly.com.
The war is still raging… if you don’t have your copy of this anthology in support of Ukraine, order it here for $30 plus post: https://rsitoski.bigcartel.com/.
Tuesday, October 11, 7 pm. Art Bar Poetry Series. Our launch of Poems in Response to Peril @ Clinton’s. Readers included editors Penn and Richard and six more poets from the anthology: Marsha Barber, Jay Brodhar, Caroline Di Giovanni, Patricia Keeney, Shelly Siskind with host Kate Rogers. .
Saging: the Journal of Creative Ageing, http://www.sage-ing.com/Sage-ing41.pdf P.2, a full page poster in colour and P. 27, info and a poem by Susan McCaslin. June 28, 2022.
Island Catholic Times. P. 17, info and a poem. June 19. An article is coming out in The Vancouver Sun on Saturday, July 16 as well as in the summer edition of WRITE, for The Writers Union of Canada. Other reviews are forthcoming…
“Ukrainian art in Canada reflects the war and our responses to it”
These passionate, often heartbreaking, poems invoke sunflowers and broken earth; intimacy and grief; falling bombs and the fragility of flesh; AK-47s and a bride’s bouquet. Gathering voices in the white heat of the moment, this anthology couldn’t be more timely or more necessary.
The book continues with an ongoing YouTube playlist of videos submitted by poets expressing solidarity with those afflicted by war (YouTube > Poets in Response to Peril). Profits go toward PEN Ukraine.
June 19, 2022. POEMS IN RESPONSE TO PERIL is out now and it is beautiful… a fitting tribute in solidarity with Ukraine! In solidarity, Londoners came out to help us launch this anthology of urgent poems in support of Ukraine on May 28 at Blackfriars Bistro & Catering, London Ontario.
The anthology has been sent to Canada’s ambassador in Kiev and to several poets and publishers in Ukraine, including Dmytro Kremin’s son, also a poet. Our first three reviews are up!
POETS IN RESPONSE TO PERIL, our Zoom on April 2, is now up, thanks to Richard-Yves Sitoski: h4. Truly a labour of love, from Canadian poets to Ukrainian poets and people. What a profound and poignant event, gathering 100 poets and participants coast to coast— holding fast for over three hours of words that we so needed to hear. Poetry is the ability to respond, and the poets did, in voices eloquently and powerfully expressed. This blog is intended to keep that community vibe flowing.
Part 1 of our zoom, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ETCb_gHO0R4, features Penn Kemp, Richard-Yves Sitoski, Susan McCaslin, Svetlana Ischenko, Russell Thornton, Albert Dumont, Bänoo Zan, Celeste Snowber, Blaine Marchand and Marsha Barber.
Kudos to Rico (Richard-Yves Sitoski), our indomitable host, along with Owen Sound Public Library! And please take a listen when you can, when you need to hear these poems. Here’s celebrating National Poetry Month, #npm22.
Attached is our cover for POEMS IN RESPONSE TO PERIL, designed by Rico.
Here’s to the community of poets! Gathering voices: so many ways of maintaining connection. May the conversation continue! For updates, please see Gathering Voices, https://www.facebook.com/groups/PendasProductions.
Gathering Voices: poets and participants respond to our Zoom
A wonderful event! Still glowing from the sense of purpose generated when poets come together for an important cause. Poetry forever! Marsha Barber
Thank you all so much for what was an amazing event. Penn, Susan and Richard for your dedication to this cause, and all the poets and audience. It was deeply moving. Yvonne Blomer
– it was deeply moving, and healing. Thank you all! Kate Braid
It was an extraordinary afternoon hearing all the poets read, relating to these dreadful events in Ukraine. The strange thing is that I didn’t realize how I needed to hear the human reactions, responses poetically—Facing this issue head on (through poetry) is, to my mind, part of the eventual reconstruction of world community. Holly (& Allan) Briesmaster
Richard/Penn: Congratulations on an impressive Zoom launch! Of all the Zoom events in the past few years i have attended this was the most high profile and meaningful with poets caring about the Ukrainian crisis. Plus so many other topics that they are passionate about. I am so heartened Canadian poets are deeply engaged in the tragedies of the day. I look forward to seeing the anthology and am proud that when the history of these times is written there will not be a blank page for the poets. David Brydges
Today, I spent almost two hours in zoom poetry reading for “Poets In Response To Peril” as organized by Canadian Poet Penn Kemp. When the invasion of Ukraine began, she wanted to put together a chapbook, but instead, the outpouring of Canadian voices created a full-length book.. within days. This is a really remarkable and quick effort, and the reading had me in tears as a poetry and people lover. My cat enjoyed the reading as well. 🙂 The proceeds of the book sales will go to PEN Ukraine. Please consider purchasing this book in support of the voices of Ukraine and PEN Ukraine. email inquiries and orders to:r_sitoski@yahoo.ca Sarah M. Daugherty
My sincere thanks to Penn and Richard and the Library Zoom meister for arranging a truly astonishing afternoon of poetry, coast to coast. It was an honour to take part. Our poems now go out like prayers to Ukraine and , sadly, other places in our world where people suffering in peril may find a measure of comfort in our words. Poetry does have power. With love, Caroline Morgan Di Giovanni
Our time together yesterday reminded me of a statement I made years ago. This is it: “Time is the storage place of our memories. And the human heart is the storage place of our tears. I have gone to that place of memories and visited where tears are kept. What I retrieved was the notion that poetry is delightful to the human spirit.” I hope your Sunday is restful and emotionally uplifting. Albert Dumont
Congratulations on this impressive mobilization of poetic force in support of our allies and fellow artists under attack in Ukraine. Neil Eddinger
These poets…so amazing…all of them. Kim Fahner
What an event dear Penn, and such variety and diversity and even Ukrainian spoken! Brava! A huge life-changing Poets in Response to Peril event. Brava/bravo Richard and Penn!! The variety, poignancy, astoundingly creative and delightful videos all contribute to a masterful, memorable production. Katerina Vaughan Fretwell
We were particularly interested in your latest book since it also benefits those affected in the Ukraine. What a beautiful endeavour that helps shed light on the dreadful situation expressed with poetry. It is so beneficial and of course, our residents love reading poetry! Rebecca Gee
Dear Penn, Rico, Susan and all who made this special event possible…It was an emotional gathering of coast-to-coast poets and poems and I was honoured to be part of the outpouring of love and grief and hope at this time of peril. Here’s to peace and freedom indeed! Diana Hayes
Dear Penn & Rico, Warm thanks for hosting such a wonderful event! It was fabulous. I know it took a lot of energy to do that. You’re culture heroes! Excellent reading. — It came out great! Good to see and hear so many supportive authors! A strong reading set! — The book extends vital support of Ukraine while condemning war. What a massive job. Your combined energies on the reading, video and book are deeply appreciated. Here’s hoping that the war will come to an end soon. The world stands against the atrocities. It is good that Canadian writers also stand against such martial aggression. Thank you for it all, Sunflowers for Ukraine) 🌼🌼 🌼 Karl Jirgens
And thanks dear heart for all your continuing efforts. I love that the whole project began with the conviction that poetry makes everything happen…in its time. Patricia Keeney
Such an amazing project! I hope the blog post, the project (and the new book!) get lots of well-deserved attention and love! Renée Knapp
Thank you Richard-Yves Sitoski and Penn Kemp for all the work you put into Saturday’s very moving “Poets in Response to Peril” event. It felt like a teaser for the upcoming anthology. Now I can’t wait to read “Poems in Response to Peril”. Mary Little
Wonderful initiative, great event. And thanks to you Penn, to Richard-Yves, to Susan McCaslin who worked so hard to bring it to fruition. Thanks to Tim for the technical support. A great gathering. Splendid poetry. Now people should purchase the Anthology and help support Ukraine. But it was great to feel a part of the poetic community this afternoon. I look forward to reading the anthology. There were many powerful, moving poems this afternoon. Blaine Marchand
Dear Penn & Richard, Thanks to you both for collaborating on this wonderful and meaningful event. I hope more books orders flow in. Thanks for all you are doing to get more poets’ voice out to the public, Penn. And thanks for the links you are providing to preserve people’s responses to Saturday’s amazing event. The event continues opening in ever-widening circles! Susan McCaslin
Yes, thank you Penn, Rico, Tim, Susan, and all of my fellow poets for a most intense and meaningful event. I’ll remember it! Susan McMaster
One of the poets said that she was falling in love with the community of poets on the zoom. Certainly, it was a wonderful group of poets, both in terms of their poetry and also their humanity. In the midst of sorrow about the war, there was also much beauty in the poets’ words…The breadth and depth of the poems shared by the poets was emotionally moving. Thank you again for putting together such a phenomenal project. Ola Nowasad
I would like to order a copy of Poems in Response to Peril. I attended the Zoom event on April 2nd and it was phenomenal. Lisa Reynolds
That was a very rich and varied collection of poems and poets. A delight to be a part of the gathering. Well done, organizers. Thanks! Peggy Roffey
Sorry Penn for not to be able to participate at event with my voice. I was just ear but not voice. Anyway, I already doing my best with colegues writer here in Bosnia to help some of Ukrainian writer to find temporarry home here in Sarajevo and to be evacuate with great help of German Goethe Institute. I hope I am doing right, aven I have Memory of myself rejecting to leave Sarajevo with my two Children on the beginnig of four years long siege of my city starting 1992. All the best to you and friends making that event possible. Goran Simic Because of a poor connection from Bosnia, Goran was able to be with us only “by ear but not voice.” How ironic, because the voices of those who have known war need to be heard! As this conversation points out: Dear Mr Simic, (And Everyone else…) I have not had the pleasure of meeting you, but I do know of your fine work, and have just now read two of your poems, https://www.calvertjournal.com/articles/show/13065/poems-about-migration-love-and-war-by-bosnian-poet-goran-simic. It does not seem right that you could not share your voice at this event, particularly because in addition to your gifts as a poet, you are much closer in many ways to the bloody events unfolding in the Ukraine than many of us here. Robert Girvan Dear Robert, thank you for kind words about my poetry. I will be glad to record one of my poems to participate for video Message as Canadian/ Bosnian contribution of poets who alarm the world about attack on Ukrainian state, culture and history. All of my friends writers who survived siege in Sarajevo still feel alive the same scars watching destruction of city and civilians in Ukraina. But with pride for people not to give up struggle. I will do video asap because I spend most of my day on the hill keeping company to the four street abandoned dogs we adopted five years ago. Goran Simic Dear Goran, Excellent! I look forward to seeing you and hearing your voice and words. The lucky ones who have not (yet) faced war, bow their heads to those who have endured it, and listen. Robert Girvan Goran has sent the video of his poem for https://www.youtube.com/user/veggiemeister/playlists. I hope you do too.His greetings from Sarajevo and the poem: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mW1KSzzPQ9c&list=PLDARA01MjoyW7WccH9j6yGtI3XZhcE0BD&index=41.
I am still feeling the pleasure of seeing you in your great blue and yellow costume, and the honour of being involved in the hours of poetic tension that was so invigorating, even in the perilous present. Elizabeth Waterston
All I can say is Thank you and love to you. You are a great inspiration, your spirit, insights and grace encourage me, inspire. Sheri-D Wilson
Please let me add my voice to those who have already thanked the organizers and all who attended yesterday’s reading. It was indeed a marathon and, as one of the final readers, it was gratifying to see how many people hung in through the whole reading in an amazing outpouring of solidarity, support and yes, love. As Richard has noted, if even a fraction of that positive reverse-bomb energy intervenes in places in the world where people’s lives are torn by violence, we will have done our bit for peace and for the sustainable future of humanity. I look forward to receiving my copies of the anthology. Susan Wismer
Poems in Response to Peril: An Anthology highlights the work by 48 of our most committed Canadian poets, responding to the current crisis in Ukraine and other perils afflicting our troubled times. These passionate, often heartbreaking, poems offer us sunflowers and broken earth; intimacy and grief; falling bombs and the fragility of flesh; AK-47s and a bride’s bouquet. This anthology couldn’t be more timely and necessary.
Poems in Response to Peril is 125 pages of poetry that describe what Penn Kemp calls “a sharing of community, of heart space. Such an outlet for despair helps us—both writer and reader— to become activists. The poems encompass the entirety of human emotions, written and published in the white heat of this moment in 2022. The videos of readings by our contributors will be linked by q.r. code in the book! You can see 40 readings now up on https://www.youtube.com/user/veggiemeister/playlists.
Poems in Response to Peril will be published in Spring, 2022 by Pendas Productions/Laughing Raven Press. Pre-orders are $25 plus postage. To order Poems in Response to Peril, please email Richard-Yves Sitoski, r_sitoski@yahoo.ca.
Here’s celebrating National Poetry Month with poems that move us to action!
Penn Kemp 