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

Illustratively Speaking

About a year ago, Wolfville artist Jack McMaster spent some time under the sign of the g, creating illustrations for a 12-page limited edition accordion book, Tim Bowling’s Refrain for Rental Boat #4. Tim’s poem describes a frustrating day salmon fishing on the Fraser River Delta. We asked Jack to tell us a bit about “pochoir,” the stencilling technique he used to create the water motif that runs through the book. Here’s what he had to say:

“When Andrew first approached me about illustrating Rental he had an idea as to how it would be produced:

The finished book would be an accordion fold with each page being 8" x 8." It could be opened as you would any book to a two-page spread (8" x 16") or opened fully (8" x 96"). The illustrated portion consists of four two-page spreads which are 8" x 64" when fully opened.



He felt there should be an illustration of a handrail or boat that would be printed letterpress on the title page with a water motif that would follow (flow) through the remaining pages using a pochoir technique.

Pochoir is the French word for stencilling. It had its heyday in Paris in the 1920s. Books were also produced in London, New York and Florence.

Stencil sheets are placed over the page to be coloured. Using a brush of coarse, shortly cropped animal hair, paint is dabbed through the stencil. Traditional paints were watercolour (transparent) or gouache (opaque). I've used printing ink in the past with some success. However, drying time can be an issue here.



When colouring Rental I choose watercolour as I wanted to run some of the coloured lines through text. The more transparent the colour the more water you have to add. To give the colour more body so that it wouldn't seep under the stencil I added gum arabic to the mix. Calligraphic lines were used to represent flowing water, as I was worried that the paper would buckle if the areas to be coloured were too large. The stencils were cut from clear film, which allowed for better visibility and control of registration.



Fortunately I was able to produce the piece at Gaspereau Press which had space to accommodate the spread we were dealing with. As for the company …”

For more information about this title, or to obtain a copy, please visit the Gaspereau Press website.