poetry

Laurence Hutchman | Selected Poems | Gazelle Books

Posted by

0

Laurence Hutchman’s poetry is a witness to the world around him to the patterns of families, nations, and landscape. He hears Mozart in the supermarket, and Nelligan breaking into song. While there’s a refreshingly outward-looking documentary zeal in his poetry, transformations abound: a typewriter becomes a ‘silent temple,’ a baseball glove a ‘leather flower,’ a forest a ‘way of going into myself.’ With this selection from his previous books, it’s clearer than ever how Hutchman’s mix of curiosity-driven realism and metaphorical surprise gives his poetry generosity and scope.” — Brian Bartlett Continue reading →

Rebecca Dunham | The Miniature Room | Gazelle Books

Posted by

0

With tender probing and tight expressive language, ‘The Miniature Room’ explores the grace and power of the miniscule as it exists within an infinite universe. This 2006 T S Eliot Prize-winning collection utilises rich imagery and complex interlocking meanings as author Rebecca Durham builds off the classical themes of art, history, nature, love, life, religion, and motherhood to provide a sensual and inquisitive body of work. Continue reading →

Charles Noble | Death Drive Through Gaia Paris | Gazelle Books

Posted by

0

Each of the poems in Noble’s latest collection is seventeen syllables, a kind of haiku. Nobel explains that these “short hairs,” or pseudo haikus, are not in fact traditional haikus. Rather he prefers to call them logopoeic haikus, even though this is a contradiction in terms. Logopoeia, of course, being Ezra Pound’s term and of the three possible dominances (the other two of the standard ménage à trois being phanoand melopoeia) he claimed logopoeia to be the riskiest— a tending to philosophy and a leaving of poetry. Continue reading →

Carol V. Davis | Into the Arms of Pushkin: Poems of St. Petersburg | Gazelle Books

Posted by

0

Carol V. Davis is the granddaughter of Jewish immigrants from Russia. Her fascination with Russia, aided by a Fulbright grant, drew her to St Petersburg in the mid 1990s. Over the next decade, she divided her time between the US and Russia, where, as an American-born Jew, she was an outsider in Russian society. This collection of poems expresses the struggle with language barriers and cultural differences — struggles heightened as Davis helped her children adjust to their new daily life. Inspired by Russia’s rich history, its economic changes, and landscape, these poems express a unique perspective of Russia. Continue reading →

Titos Patrikios | The Lion’s Gate: Selected Poems of Titos Patrikios | Gazelle Books

Posted by

0

The Lions’ Gate introduces a crucial voice in world poetry to readers in English. Titos Patrikios is a poet of witness and engagement. A member of the intellectual left in post-war Greece, he survived imprisonment, hard labour, censorship, and exile. He narrowly escaped death by firing squad, and once had to bury his poems to keep them from discovery by the authorities. Patrikios endured years away from his home country, Greece, and was displaced from his family and literary community. His style bears the marks of that pressure and of his persistent need to pursue what might suffice in spite of such predicaments. At times reminiscent of Hikmet, Neruda, and Milosz, Patrikios’s poems sound a note of defiant celebration. This poet’s ethos is utterly humanistic and his impulses are toward praise as often as they are toward protest. Continue reading →

Nick Mancuso | Mediterranean Men | Gazelle Books

Posted by

0

Internationally recognised actor, Nick Mancuso was born in Calabria, Italy, in 1948. In 1953 his family migrated to Toronto, Canada, where he spent his formative years and attended the University of Toronto and the University of Guelph. He received a degree in Psychology in 1968, after which he began his professional acting career. A founding member of the ‘alternative’ theatres of Toronto including Toronto Free Theatre and Factory Lab Theatre, Nick Mancuso has starred in over 120 movies and stage TV programs, world-wide. He has been a recipient of many acting awards, including the Genie (Canada), The Houston Festival Best Actor Award, and Il Polifemo D’Argento (Italy). He has also written and performed his own works: Hotel Praha and The Death of Socrates, which was broadcast by CBC Radio. Continue reading →

Denise Desautels | The Night Will Be Insistent: Selected Poems 1987-2002 | Gazelle Books

Posted by

0

The writings of Denise Desautels have circulated in Quebec and Europe for some thirty years or so. She is considered to be one of the most talented poets in Quebec, often taking inspiration from the visual arts which she has a gift for seeing in words. As her translator, I was very conscious of this aspect of her work, and when various choices arose in the course of the translation process, I almost always opted for the most pictorial or the most visual element possible. ‘A picture is worth a thousand words’ as the saying goes, but the picture, once created, can give rise in the poet’s mind to metaphors and ‘word art’ that allow us to see the same picture in a totally new and profound way. Denise Desautels has performed this feat of poetic legerdemain brilliantly in The Night Will be Insistent.” — Daniel Sloate Continue reading →

Maria Mazziotti Gillan | All That Lies Between Us | Gazelle Books

Posted by

0

Here are presented a selection of poems where we find the geography of the heart’s home — not a physical but rather an emotional centre around which she constructs the story of her life. Her world is populated by memories of growing up in the 50s, her courtship and long marriage, husband’s illness, and children. But at the centre is the woman she has become who struggles to deal with the complexities of love and the difficulties of achieving compassion and tenderness in the face of adversity. Brave, honest, beautiful, these poems help us to understand what it means to be human. Continue reading →

George McWhirter | Anachronicles | Gazelle Books

Posted by

0

This is a collection of unusually rich poems that are both proto- and post-colonial. The title itself — melding the two words “anachronism” and “chronicle” — points to how the poems explore events and exchanges in one place from two points in time. The place itself is La Audiencia Beach in Mexico. Instead of portraying history only from the present looking backwards, McWhirter also has the past looking forward to foresee and comment on what is to happen as a result of the early exploration. Here, Hernán Cortés and his Lieutenant-Conqueror of Colima, Sandoval, appraise the antics of Bo Derek and other stars as they make the movie 10 — on the same beach where four hundred years earlier their crews built three brigantines to explore what is now called the Sea of Cortez. The verse-logs then follow explorer Don Caamaño and his successors up the Pacific Coast to where John McKay (aka Sean McKoy), an Irishman, was left to recuperate from a sickness among the Nootka/Nuu-chah-nulth on Vancouver Island. The final poem, “Hops,” retells the Irish legend of the goddess Liadan and the poet Cuirithir, whose voices travel to one another from Canada and Ireland. The dialogue travels from the end of the last millennium to the 1950s, highlighting their present-day divided Christian-pagan roles as mortal man and woman in holy orders. Continue reading →