National Poetry Month

Jan Zwicky is a musician, philosopher and award-winning poet. In 1999, she won the Governor General’s Literary Award for poetry for Songs for Relinquishing the Earth. Her most recent collection of poetry, Thirty-seven Small Songs & Thirteen Silences (GP, 2005), was nominated for the Pat Lowther Award and the Dorothy Livesay Prize. In May 2008, we published a hardcover new-edition of Zwicky's GG-nominated book of philosophy, Wisdom & Metaphor. Zwicky currently teaches philosophy at the University of Victoria.

Today's poem, 'Small Song in Praise of Ears' appears in Thirty-seven Small Songs & Thirteen Silences and Gaspereau Gloriatur: Volume 1 (GP, 2007).

from Gaspereau Gloriatur: Volume 1
Jan Zwicky

Small Song in Praise of Ears

Ah, my mushrooms,
my little fishes!
They laugh
when I tell them
you are beautiful.
Ah, my pink mice,
my infant trolls!

But who among them
has drunk dawn with its
thrush-scented air?
Who but you
has fingered silence,
that dark jewel
burning at night’s throat.

Copyright © Jan Zwicky, 2005

National Poetry Month

Harry Thurston was born in Yarmouth, Nova Scotia, and has lived most of his life in his native province. For the last 25 years he has travelled widely as a full-time freelance writer for many of North America's leading magazines, including Audubon, Canadian Geographic, Harrowsmith, and National Geographic. He has served as a contributing editor of Equinox since its inception in 1981. His work has garnered several national journalism awards. Thurston currently lives in Tidnish Bridge, Nova Scotia, with his wife and daughter. Among his most recent publications are Broken Vessel: Thirty-five Days in the Desert (GP, 2007), A Ship Portrait (GP, 2005) and If Men Lived On Earth (GP, 2000).

Today's poem, 'Chimney Swifts' appeared in Gaspereau Gloriatur: Volume 1 (GP, 2007) an anthology celebrating the first ten years of Gaspereau Press poetry.

from Gaspereau Gloriatur: Volume 1
Harry Thurston

Chimney Swifts

     for Catherine

Fly ash, swifts swirl counter-
clockwise around the chimney

like smoke returning
to the fire. Time’s arrow

is reversed. As we watch their flight
spiral into darkness,

we are growing younger,
back toward our births,

borne to our mother’s womb
on charcoal wings.

First one bravely dips
into the inky stack,

then the others
obediently funnel down

to the mystery of our origins.
A place still, dark, expectant.

Dusk, the show is over,
we file obediently toward our appointment

with sleep, resume our steady movement
no longer suspended by waking wonder.

In the morning, the flock
unwinds like clock springs,

flies up as if the night foreman
had returned, kindled old fires.

The swifts, winged carbon, spiral up,
clockwise at the dawn light,

setting the day in motion,
unfurling the future.

Copyright © Harry Thurston, 2007

National Poetry Month

In 2006, we published Aiken Drum, a collection of poetry by Peter Sanger, editor of The Antigonish Review. Sanger has published seven collections of poetry, including Earth Moth (1991) and Arborealis (2005), a collaborative project with photographer Thaddeus Holownia. His recent prose work includes The Stone Canoe (GP, 2007), White Salt Mountain: Words in Time (GP, 2005) and Spar: Words in Place (GP, 2002). He lives in South Maitland, Nova Scotia.

“Fossil Fern” is from Aiken Drum and is reprinted in the Gaspereau Gloriatur: Volume 1.

from Aiken Drum
Peter Sanger

Fossil Fern

This is the gift of a laminar stain,
an etching of carbon whose
black turns back into green

if you taste it, pinnae
uncoiling, pinnules unfurling
as if they might fly

and flight were one frond away
from this throatful of fern
still growing. A slate of grey

clay is its ground, an earth
you can hold for colour,
shape, speech, all life

in your hands, where spores once
appeared to manipulate silence.

Copyright © Peter Sanger, 2006.

Poetic & Typographic Form

This is the opening poem from Ross Leckie’s collection Gravity’s Plumb Line. One of the things I like about Leckie’s work is the way in which it often employs and yet flexes the boundaries of formalism, and this was something I tried to embody in the book’s design. I set the book using a type based on the neoclassical letterforms of John Baskerville (1706–75), types whose structure and tradition were in sympathy with the poetic structures and traditions present in Leckie’s own poems. At the same time, I subverted Baskervillian formalism on the jacket, cover and title page, employing a playfulness lifted directly from Leckie. This particular poem is from a suite about New Brunswick’s Saint John River, which descends from Little St. John Lake to the Atlantic poem by poem. It is reprinted in the poetry anthology Gaspereau Gloriatur, Volume 1.


Little St. John Lake
Ross Leckie

The frowzy lake covered with weed
is merely a little spilled water,
afterthought to an afternoon’s rain.

It is a cloudy day, the clouds touched
just once lightly in purple ink.
The mosquitoes will be out later.

French and English spill over this
splash of greeny brown and murky
green. Or they would if anyone

were here—they do back in St. Aurelie
where the leak of water trickling north
briefly marks a border between

Québec and Maine. But this is the
place where it all begins, the lake
a crystal pitcher tipping its liquid

into a trick of evening light.
Brackish, shallow, a seep through
the furze and spindly spruce, it moves

as if it has all the time in the world—
and it does; a foot sinks in the soft mud,
icy water slips over the lip of your boot.

Copyright © Ross Leckie, 2005

National Poetry Month

Before we did Sean Johnston’s stunning debut novel All This Town Remembers in 2006, Gaspereau Press published a little chapbook of his poems called Bull Island as a number in our Devil’s Whim Occasional Chapbook series. This poem is from that chapbook. It is also reprinted in the poetry anthology Gaspereau Gloriatur: Volume 1. — AS


Obviously
Sean Johnston

Obviously, the moon and its shadows,
the moon and what it did, the moon
and its movement with water —

I said it to her, fresh as we were,
I said it to her because the night
had already happened, and the dark,

and we’d missed it and then the moon
with its sudden appearance made sudden
by our muscled ignorance, our concern

with other concerns — the sex, for instance;
the noise of it and would it be wrapped
up properly or would a baby wake up

and announce itself, our baby just next
door, in such a room — and it didn’t and so
suddenly, the moon, and I said it to her

and of course, she said to me, of course.

Copyright © Sean Johnston, 2004

National Poetry Month

While Harold Horwood (1923–2006) was best known as a novelist and journalist, he was also a labour organizer, literary editor, political columnist, and spent a term sitting as a member of the Newfoundland and Labrador House of Assembly under Joey Smallwood’s Liberal government from 1949–51.

Horwood brought his small book of Labrador poems, Cycle of the Sun, to Gaspereau Press on the recommendation of our mutual friend Harry Thurston. Horwood’s visit was one of the most awkward introductions I’ve ever had to an author. Horwood spent the majority of the meeting with his back to me, seemingly indifferent, examining the contents of my bookshelf. After listening to me trying to carry the conversation for a while, he muttered something like Well, okay, let's do it and left. From there on in, we worked by correspondence, which was equally cryptic. I have to admit I rather enjoyed our too brief association.

The text of Cycle of the Sun was composed in Garamond using a Ludlow hot metal caster and handprinted in a limited edition. The books were handbound by then Gaspereau editorial assistant Christine McNair, who went on to study book arts in England and is now a book conservator and poet in Ottawa. This poem is also reprinted in the poetry anthology Gaspereau Gloriatur: Volume 1. — AS

Caribou Hunt
Harold Horwood

Over the Kiglapaites the white gyrfalcon
divides the heavens like a falling star
or tilting over the cliffs of Saglec Bay
cleaving the vault of air
above a country where the rioting
of races far to the south like summer thunder
is heard but faintly. No one has ventured here
excepting those who travelled out of the North,
the people of the walrus and the bear.
Far south, within the shelter of the treeline
the Innu read the oracles of bones
seeking for spirit guidance, how to confront
steel birds that thunder over the spruces
scattering death. They chant of Jacopish
in the sky and Atik-wennabeo in the forest.
I wish them well, although I truly fear
that the game lords will withhold their favours
while the land lies cursed under the white shadow.
All this is not for me, an Inuk wandering
far north of Goose Bay, northward from Nitassinan
here where the steel birds in an elder time
burst through my father’s dreaming,
and left their bones on the cliffs.

My homeland is the barren ground—I travel here,
watching the waving fields of cotton grass
in copper-coloured revelry,
rock, peat bog, caribou moss,
stone-studded lakes where the osprey hovers
between cloud and cloud-shadow, all of it empty
of humankind. But the grey wolf lives here
in the month of the hunter, following the deer,
moving ghost-like along the edges of green dawns—
grey forms, their ankles clicking like clocks on the grey stone
as day breaks diamonded cobwebs on a frozen marsh.

So I sit here brewing tea at the door of the tent,
and sing you this song, Old Man of the Caribou,
that your heart may be glad,
and my belly may be full.

Copyright © Harold Horwood, 2005.

National Poetry Month

Today’s poem is by Michael deBeyer. These days, Michael lives in Fredericton, NB, but he recently completed a two-year stint working at the Gaspereau Press as a press operator. (If you’re reading this, Michael, remember the mantra: If you’ve problems with the ink, check the water ...). Michael is one of the only writers to appear in both the Shift & Switch and The New Canon poetry anthologies published a few years ago, demonstrating the extent to which his writing supersedes easy reduction to membership in any one aesthetic camp. Gaspereau Press has published two books by Michael, Rural Night Catalogue (2002) and Change in a Razor-backed Season (2005), from which this poem is taken. It is also reprinted in the poetry anthology Gaspereau Gloriatur: Volume 1. — AS

Imagining the Black Bear into the Parking Lot
Michael deBeyer

I don’t know that it would be fair to think of it,
to pool the black bear this way, to pull it out,
the way it may have circled, steam culled from the body
into the morning air, its gentlest behaviour.
Matted hair above the ruff, a reddish winter coat
going to seed; hair cut against the forest’s
bluntest tools; tooth in nail, berry-seeded jelly.
Each limb needle-pointed with dew, bearing inspection.
Belly up for the sun to filter out the night damp.
Stomach taut. The embedded, richly earthy musk.
That it left last autumn’s colour with a temporary
impression: a paw print deep enough to put a fist in.

Copyright © Michael deBeyer, 2005.

National Poetry Month

The poem we’ve picked for today is from Singing the Flowers Open, our first book with the New Brunswick poet Allan Cooper. It is also reprinted in the poetry anthology Gaspereau Gloriatur: Volume 1.
— AS


The Worker Bee
Allan Cooper

 My mother hands me the still form of a worker bee. It is
strangely silent in my palm, curled in on itself, as if asleep.
I’m careful with it at first, for I remember the sudden heat
of the stinger. But this yellow and black bee, striped near
the rump, once as feared as a lion, won’t sting again. I feel a
sadness holding it, for it is like anything that has lived and
died—what you miss most is the motion, the supple flow
of moving form. I look at the face: it is shaped a bit like a
sheep’s, coal black, only shinier, reflective as polished stone.
And the wings are stained glass in a monk’s room, or a map
on the wall, sketching the steep paths of the air.
 I pick her up by one wing and shake her. She rattles like
ripe seeds inside a pod. The whir of wings is reduced to this
single sort of sound, abrupt and sharp, like castanets shaken
by someone mourning a death. Perhaps this is the sound of
the honey stomach, now dry like all the other organs, but
still holding a sweetness that never got back to the hive.
And maybe inside there is amber, and if I opened her now
the scent of honey would rise from the body casket, and
the many eyes on the face would remember flowers, bright
spring flowers, clover and dandelion, their colours in June—
and other colours known only to the bee, ultraviolet, yellow
and blue.

Copyright © Allan Cooper, 2001.

National Poetry Month

Few writers deliver as electrifying a live performance as George Elliott Clarke. We’ve published a number of books by George, from his stark, award-winning Execution Poems, to his lush poetic verse plays Trudeau and Québécité. The poem we’ve picked for poetry month is from his chapbook Africadian History. It is also reprinted in the poetry anthology Gaspereau Gloriatur: Volume 1.
— AS

Sermon on J.W. Doull’s Used Books Store
George Elliott Clarke

Poetry is a useful art.
— Trudeau

Shakespeare and Milton brush against
Demi-mondaines like Longfellow,
Or faint luminaries like Rod McKuen,
Or those anonymous, dead stars—
Discards, pitilessly tumbled in bins,
Ignorant that professors praised
Their lines to judgmental undergrads,
Who would not forsake embraces
And dark beer to warm a poet’s words
In their skulls or bedside shelves.

Discounted, musty, some who anguish
Over lines will languish in mildew
Graves until some light-summoning poet
Plucks them from dank obscurity.

Copyright © George Elliott Clarke, 2001.

National Poetry Month

April is the cruelest month, breeding lilacs out of the dead land, mixing memory and desire, stirring dull roots with spring rain.
– T.S. Eliot

Well, Tom, say what you wish about April, but here at Gaspereau Press it’s a month that gets us all shook up. Not only is there water running in the brooks and birds singing in the trees, warm sun coaxing grass to green and trees to blossom – there are also the spring poetry books, the fruits of our winter’s labours, ready for readers.

Poetry? I hear you saying. But don’t go making the mistake of thinking that poetry is all delicate frou-frou about lovers, obscure flowers and Greek goddesses. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that. Some of my best friends are Greek goddesses.) Poetry is tough stuff. Made right, poetry is the very sinew which holds language together, making communication and understanding possible. It allows us to temporarily hold impossibilities in place and examine them, to consider one thing through the lens of another, as Shakespeare does with his beloved and a red rose. Simply put, the limber, metaphorical language of poetry makes it possible to express things about our experience in this world which might otherwise lie beyond expression. Where there is meaning, there is likely some form of poetry giving it voice; where there is poetry, meaning is possible.

King Oedipus, frustrated by his inability to procure an executive summary of an oracle from the prophet Teiresias, grumbles How needlessly your riddles darken everything. Sophocles has his wry prophet respond that in riddle answering you are strongest. Is it any surprise that a writer faced with the complex tensions and contradictions present in a figure like Oedipus – a figure at once guiltless in his ignorance of his crime and guilty of a great offence against order – would advocate for a limber, metaphoric language strong enough to convey difficult, dangerous truths? And how could a language that wily, that full of tensile strength, do anything other than get you excited about April? … Tom?

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In Canada, April is National Poetry Month, and we’ve decided to celebrate by reaching into our poetry backlist and posting a poem on our blog every day for the rest of the month. Most of the poems we will feature are from books published by Gaspereau Press, but we’re also planning a few surprises.

We'll kick things off with a poem by the west coast poet Tim Bowling, who is presently living in Edmonton. The poem appeared in Fathom, which was published by Gaspereau Press in 2006 and won the 2007 Alberta Book Award for poetry. It also appears in the 10th anniversary anthology Gaspereau Gloriatur: Volume 1. – AS


Sixteen Wild Cherry Trees
Tim Bowling

In a pair of cut-off jeans and nothing else
I go back to raid them.

They’re gone. If I want to stain myself
I’ll have to cut and bleed.

Eight samurai
thick thighs planted
girded our town.

When they cried
I walked in their tears.

After battle
I was a crow
at their guts.

Sixteen lookouts—

now who watches
the high mountain passes
for the man who must raid
what he loves
to survive?

Copyright © Tim Bowling, 2006