Poetry

It is not surprising that poets who are passionate lovers of words should also be passionate readers as well. It follows in turn that their poetical muse should occasionally lead them to reflect and write on the subject of books and reading. Two highly proficient B.C. poets who have done so are Susan McCaslin and David Zieroth. Susan, a Fort Langley based poet, has authored eleven volumes of poetry, seven chapbooks, a children’s book and is the editor of two anthologies. David, a North Vancouver poet, is the author of seven books of poetry, two chapbooks and a memoir. Both, of course, have appeared in numerous literary magazines. More information is available about Susan on her website at www.susanmccaslin.ca and at Alan Twigg’s ABCBookWorld website at www.abcbookworld.com. More information is available about David at his website at www.davidzieroth.com or at the ABCBookWorld site.

Susan’s poem “Bookishness Banished” first appeared in the literary journal A Room of One’s Own in December 2002 (Vol. 25, No. 4). It was also published in her volume of Poetry A Plot of Light published by Oolichan Press in Lantzville, B.C. in 2004.


BOOKISHNESS BANISHED

Book bag woman
nose in book

in the grocery line up
or on the toilet

after making love
or with a flashlight, tenting.

Fiction, biography,
classics or trash,

print rolls my head around.
I read in my sleep.

Words, my profession,
words, my accusers

and champions.
Word-haunted woman

word heated and chilled.
Itinerate wordsmith’s

open shop and season.
Zen feats of mindful

eating and reading.
Libraries relax me

more than boudoirs.
Secrets on vellum.

Heart is a hand press.
Letters set me dancing.

Alphabets fall from my ears
like from God in the beginning.

I am crazed with codes.
No wonder my Maker

is a silent word.
No wonder this opening

behind purple drapery
is to sumptuous silence.

David’s poem entitled “How Wise” will be newly published as one of seven heroic sestets in an upcoming issue (Vol. 36 No. 3) of Event magazine which will be ready in January 2008. Hopefully it will also take pride of place in a future book of poetry.

HOW WISE

How wise to give away your books!
To keep yourself free from boxes
when you move, paradoxes
in every one: those words look
light and lovely on the page but turn out
leaden when you have to mess about

schlepping old classics up new stairs.
Better to hand them off one by one,
the novels to your sister, John Donne
to anyone who still says prayers.
Keep back a few, the special heroes
of your heart who soar past the common Joes

like yourself – like me – and make a life
we couldn’t make. One box of words will do,
to fill your need for guidance into
the new home, along with knives,
pillows, pants and postures, lamp and bed.
Sad tales of the old place stay behind (to live unsaid).

Lemon Hound’s Sina Queyras Visits West Coast for Two Great Readings

March 15 – 17 — Vancouver Goes to the Dogs:
Lemon Hound’s Sina Queyras Visits West Coast for Two Great Readings

In mid-March, the Vancouver literary scene is going to the dogs. Sina Queyras, author of the acclaimed book, Lemon Hound, visits Van City for two readings as part of her West Coast tour. On March 15, Queyras teams with satirist and MAC Farrant, author of Darwin Alone in the Universe and the new The Breakdown So Far (Talonbooks) for a night author of stellar literary entertainment at the UBC Robson Square Bookstore (800 Robson Street). Then, on March 17– St. Patrick’s Day – celebrate the luck of the Irish with the decidedly non-gaelic Sina Queyras, as she reads as the featured author in the Kootenay School of Writing’s reading series at Spartacus Books (319 West Hastings).

Sina Queyras and MAC Farrant at UBCRobson Reading Series
Thursday, March 15, 7:00 p.m.
UBC Robson Square Bookstore, 800 Robson Street

The Kootenay School of Writing presents Sina Queyras
Saturday, March 17, 8:00 p.m.
Spartacus Books, 319 West Hastings

***

About Lemon Hound:

This is a poetry not of snapshots or collages but of long-exposed captures of the not-so-still lives of women. One The Wavesby attempting to untangle its six sequence imagines Virginia Woolf’s childhood; another unmakes her novel The Waves by attempting to untangle its six overlapping narratives. Yet another, 'On the Scent,' makes us flâneurs through the lives of a series of contemporary women, while 'The River Is All Thumbs' uses a palette of vibrant repetition to 'paint' a landscape.

Queyras’s language – astute, insistent, languorous – repeats and echoes until it becomes hypnotic, chimerical, almost halluncinatory in its reflexivity. How lyrical can prose poetry be? How closely can it mimic painting? Sculpture? Film? How do we make a moment firm? These ‘postmodern,’ ‘postfeminist’ poems pulse between prose and poetry: the line, the line, they seem to ask, must it ever end?

A lovely balance between lyricism and experimentalism, all the whlie unfolding a fierce intellectual and imaginative 'engagement with the work of Virginia Woolf ... She takes a hypnotic, almost hallucinatory approach, and succeeds.' –The Globe and Mail

Sina Queyras is the author of the poetry collections Slip and Teethmarks. Recently she edited Open Field: 30 Contemporary Canadian Poets, for Persea Books. Queyras is also the co-curator of Manhattan’s belladonna* reading series, series featuring experimental women’s writing. She lives in Philadelphia and teaches creative writing at Haverford College.

LEMON HOUND | SINA QUEYRAS | APRIL 2006 | 112 PP | $16.95 | ISBN 1 55245 167 4

For review copies or media requests, contact Evan Munday at 416 979 2217 or evan@chbooks.com.

(From a Coach House Books press release)