Essential Poets
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What We Pass On
Collected Poems: 1980-2009
by Maria Maziotti Gillan
Part of the Essential Poets series
In WHAT WE PASS ON: COLLECTED POEMS: 1980-2009, Maria Mazziotti Gillan weaves a tapestry of one woman's life?wife, mother, grandmother, daughter, grand-daughter, Italian American. Reading these poems in one volume makes us acutely aware of how memory is layered, each new poem adding another detail, another color, another perspective so that we watch as the poet and the people around her change. With increasing clarity and honesty, Gillan peels away all the self-protective layers and invites us in so we can see in her story a reflection of our own. Her work in all its texture and exuberance, its passion and power, forces us to care about what matters and teaches us to be human. This is a poet who, in these courageous poems, teaches us why poetry matters and why it can change us.
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We Come From the Same Light
by Danielle Fournier
Part of the Essential Poets series
To read Danielle Fournier is to plunge into the centre of a woman's heart and body - a heart that continues to beat, to search and to hope spurred on by a sensual, desirable - and desiring - body. Not only physical and emotional, Fournier's pursuits are also geographical and linguistic as she travels across continents and languages encountering bleak landscapes brightened by desire and feminine kinship. Despite the journey's internal ruptures and emotional turmoil, we reach joy and the conclusion that We come from the same light.
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Where the Sun Shines Best
by Austin Clarke
Part of the Essential Poets series
Three Canadian soldiers awaiting deployment to the war in Afghanistan beat a homeless man to death on the steps of their armoury after a night of heavy drinking. The poet, whose downtown Toronto home overlooks the armoury and surrounding park, describes the crime, its perpetrators, the victim, and a cast of homeless witnesses that includes the woman, a prostitute, who first alerts police. The subsequent trial evokes reflection on the immigrant experience the poet shares with one of the accused, and on the agony of that young soldier? mother. From Kandahar to Bridgetown to Mississauga, Ontario, Where the Sun Shines Best encompasses a tragedy of epic scope, a lyrical meditation on poverty, racism and war, and a powerful indictment of the ravages of imperialism.
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By Available Light
New And Selected Poems
by Michael Carrino
Part of the Essential Poets series
By Available Light is a book of poetry in which Michael Carrino offers poems from his four published books, along with a group of recent poems, to continue an exploration of how the act of reverie casts a sometimes pale, sometimes vivid light using evocative, sensual images of object, place, and person to remember, make sense of such remembering, and to effect how we make our way through a life.
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This Cockeyed World
by Jim Christy
Part of the Essential Poets series
COCKEYED: askew, crooked, intoxicated, absurd; marked by bends or angles; incongruous, not straight. In other words, Jim Christy, Canada's most iconoclastic and irreverent poet, views this cockeyed world the way it is; not only with 20/20 but x-ray vision and often through laughter and tears.
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A Place in the World
by Robert Flanagan
Part of the Essential Poets series
Existentialist in approach, this collection of tightly woven, abstract poems explores ageing and what it means to not be young anymore.
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Foreign Body
by Catherine Lalonde
Part of the Essential Poets series
The woman speaking in these poems is speaking of the body. Though she has a body with a head, she has a head that fails to understand her body. She is a woman whose head understands a language, but one not shared by the man she loves or wants to love. Theirs is a love-hate story between two foreign tongues that have nothing in common but the flesh. A tale of bodily couplings outside language, outside the world, and out of time; linguistically, a tale of madness. Sex has shattered her sentences. Hers is the story of a woman undone, who has willingly offered herself, abdicated utterly and been utterly defeated, as perhaps all women have dreamed of doing. It is a story as old as the world and yet brand-new. Though out of her depth, even out of her mind, she has been able to hold onto her language, to regain its use. Once the man is gone, the eternal now of his caresses at last enters the past. End, deafness, and let speech arise.
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Light and Time
by Michael Mirolla
Part of the Essential Poets series
Michael Mirolla's poetic world is one where a mirror, or any simple reflective item is tilted ever so slightly, providing an opening to places we never imagined existed. (One of them is his own birth, from the inside, looking reluctantly out.) The poet is a metaphysical detective, finding the cracks and gashes that open into other worlds. Uncomfortable in the here and now, he would rather spend time in the past/future, or on the edge of that mirror. Luckily for us, shaped by his reflective, polished imagery, all those worlds are fascinating places to visit, doing a brief meet-and-greet with his myriad ghosts.
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A New Geography of Time
by Robert Viscusi
Part of the Essential Poets series
In this slim volume, everyday objects become moments and forces, acting upon each other and changing the course of history. A lone cat, an abandoned piano, and a morning cappuccino are all more important than they initially appear. Moving through and influencing the world, these seemingly banal objects demonstrate and bend the laws of time, making an entire world spring to life.
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The Brother Inside Me
by Rachel Guido Devries
Part of the Essential Poets series
Death and its many mysteries are explored in these autobiographical poems about the passing of the poet's beloved brother, the dementia that claimed her father, and the inevitable bodily changes that come with age. Experimenting with traditional forms such as elegies and dirges, the poems keep coming back to the paradoxes of love and loss. Finally, though, solace comes in shimmering poems that connect with the poet's two earlier collections and celebrate the beauty of rural upstate New York.
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Conjuring Jesus
by Brian Day
Part of the Essential Poets series
Offering a disarmingly fresh picture of Jesus as a mystic and poet, while still closely based on biblical texts, these poems are disruptive yet devotional, startling yet reassuring. They portray Jesus in his tumultuous times as well as moments of transcendence, revealing a resolute, aware, and liberated man of his times.
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Exile At Last
Selected Poems
by Chava Rosenfarb
Part of the Essential Poets series
When Chava Rosenfarb arrived in Montreal in February 1950, she was already a published poet with one acclaimed volume, Di balade fun nekhtikn vald (The Ballad of Yesterday? Forest) to her credit. She was also a Holocaust survivor who, after being liberated from Bergen Belsen in 1945 had crossed the border illegally into Belgium, where she lived with her mother, sister and husband, all Holocaust survivors. In 1950 Rosenfarb? Montreal publisher, Harry Hershman, who had just published a Canadian edition of Di balade fun nekhtikn vald sponsored the entire group to come to Canada. Rosenfarb and her family settled in Montreal. Almost all of the poems in this collection were originally published in Yiddish. Chava Rosenfarb herself translated most of them into English. The poems have been arranged so that they follow roughly the chronology of Rosenfarb? life, beginning with the poems she wrote in the Lodz ghetto as a young girl and moving to the more mature poems of her years in Canada.
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The Bones of His Being
by Sue Chenette
Part of the Essential Poets series
In unflinching lyrics, Sue Chenette confronts her father's depression and death. Probing memories, fingering mementos - a square nail, a sketch on a napkin, she examines them for what they may reveal of the father she was sure she knew, deepened, in death, into the mystery of his own being. The poems are a journey through grief, both a search for the father she loved and a searching look into a father/daughter relationship. At the heart of the book, the sequence 'A Transport of Grief' explores a weave of pain, need, and blame, of family grudges and love, moments of solace, and the sweeping sense of loss that attends a parent's death.
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Exploding into Night
by Sandy Pool
Part of the Essential Poets series
An emotional intensity and metaphysical landscape reveal the dark spheres of a collective conscience in this beautiful yet haunting narrative poem. This tale, with its dazzling turns and deafening silence, delves deep into the heart of a grizzly Toronto murder, offering a stark reappraisal of urban existence and its heartache. A narrative eroticism that presents multiple viewpoints drives readers through blocks of prose poetry and reshapes the night someone was killed in the Parkdale area of Toronto.
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Selected Poems: Laurence Hutchman
by Laurence Hutchman
Part of the Essential Poets series
One of the Maritime Province's best poets offers his distinctive take on everyday objects, stripping them of familiarity and describing them anew, in this collection of poems from previous books. A strong sense of place-as well as the community that makes up a place-anchors the selections from this voice of Canadian realism.
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Borrowed Light
by Merle Nudelman
Part of the Essential Poets series
Weaving together complex layers of personal and political history, this collection of poems traces a Jewish family's path from 1930s Europe to 21st-century Canada. Recalling the delicate, enduring family bonds that have held fast through war and peacetime, these poems find lyric expression for the past century's traumas, large and small.
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The He We Knew
by Merle Nudelman
Part of the Essential Poets series
Courageous and astute, this collection of poems, written in varied styles, explores the emotional upheavals caused by the death of a son. Weaving together complex layers of personal history, these poems capture the poet's personal grieving process, displaying how loss can act as a catalyst in one's creative life.
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Rooms the Wind Makes
by James Deahl
Part of the Essential Poets series
James Deahl has been called "one of the ten or twenty finest poets writing in the English language." His poetry has been described as "precise articulations of landscape ..." producing "a highly charged evocation of place ... that it is as if the reader were the first person to stand there." This collection continues Deahl's exploration of the natural world around him in language that is precise and startling, tinged with nostalgia but bravely facing the realities, and always with an eye on the larger picture.
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All That Lies Between Us
by Maria Mazziotti Gillan
Part of the Essential Poets series
Constructed in the form of a memoir, these poems take on an emotional tone as the author details the story of her life. The collection is populated by her memories of childhood, courtships and marriage, family illness, children, and grandchildren. At its core is a woman struggling to deal with all the complexities of love and the difficulties of achieving compassion and tenderness in the face of adversity. Brave, honest, and beautiful, these poems shed new light on what it means to be human.
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Slender Human Weight
by Sue Chenette
Part of the Essential Poets series
In this intimate collection of poetry, Sue Chenette explores a world both familiar and mysterious. She finds-in her mother's attic, in the French countryside, and in her own home-the richness of physical objects as they embody what is felt, dreamed, longed for, and remembered.
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Changing Shores
by Nadine Ltaif
Part of the Essential Poets series
One woman's emotional and cultural journey is luxuriously illustrated in this moving collection, as she artfully recounts leaving Lebanon for a new life in Canada. In a voice that blends prose with poetry, she copes with the newfound sense of rootlessness she gains in exchange for her new freedom. Though she is finally allowed to pursue the thirst for love and desire for acceptance that her former lifestyle forbade, she unexpectedly finds sadness in what she has to give up. She richly conveys her rebirth through references to Arabic mythology and ultimately comes to terms with her exile through celebration.
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The Cure Is a Forest
by Desi Di Nardo
Part of the Essential Poets series
The Cure Is a Forest probes the various processes of growth and transformation among all living things in deep ecology. An element of animism permeates throughout the poems which are set in and against the backdrop of Canada's ecotones, greenwoods, and lakes. The Cure Is a Forest is an odyssey or escape from the city and industry into both the past and the possible. A journey of introspection and awakening, where life and death, the numinous and the mundane, and dream and reality are subtly interchangeable, and where often the intricate and impalpable levels of the human and animal spirit and psyche are entwined and illumed.
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Courage Underground
by Julie Roorda
Part of the Essential Poets series
Examining the relationship between consciousness and body, this collection of poetry penetrates hidden emotions contained by vital organs, offering new perspectives on loss and alienation that are both hilarious and startling. Through her powerful images, including those of organ transplant, lower-order creatures, and characters of the mythic underworld, Roorda boldly examines the root of courage, revealing the haunting truth behind this mysterious force.
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Fugitive Horizons
by Henry Beissel
Part of the Essential Poets series
These poems take the reader on a mind-blowing journey across the known micro- and macrocosms to the extreme outer edges of space and time. The counter-intuitive insights of modern science here become reality as we are led to question the representations of our senses. Quantum physics and cosmic relativity, captured in the intimacy of the prevailing sonnet form, create a dynamic challenging the reader to reaffirm the human world in the face of the unknowable.
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Azure
by Brian Day
Part of the Essential Poets series
This new take on Hindu mythology includes poems inspired by South Asian stories and covers the dealings of Vishnu, human avatars Rama and Krishna, and the relationship betweem Rama and his wife Sita.
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Giant Sky of the Shepherds
by Robert Flanagan
Part of the Essential Poets series
In tight, compact words that resemble an unravelling DNA code of life, poet Robert Flanagan comtemplates mortality in his latest collection. Flanagan's poetry is essential, incantatory, and almost shamanistic in its ability to cast spells that transport the reader to invaluable inner worlds.
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The Ecstatic Torture of Gratitude
by Jill Battson
Part of the Essential Poets series
The Ecstatic Torture of Gratitude pushes deep into the heart of the human condition. In lush and visceral language, Battson explores loss, beauty, nature, Francis Bacon's ordered hoarding and the meaning of Martha Stewart. Jill's poems whisper like muted Miles Davis tunes melancholy in the ear, or shout their colours from the top of desert mesas. Many of the poems are a result of a collaborative process with dancers, composers, singers and painters, but above all they will live and accrete in your memory like a perfect pearl long after their first reading.
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What My Arms Can Carry
by Gianna Patriarca
Part of the Essential Poets series
Themes of immigration and memory characterize this book of populist poetry. Gutsy and direct, the poet's voice is also tender and humorous as her poems create small portraits of people in the midst of daily life.
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Fire Watcher
by Vivian Demuth
Part of the Essential Poets series
From the vast expanse of the boreal forest, Vivian Demuth shows both an exquisite eye for detail and a profound concern for the larger environmental picture. Her lively poems show that, to an engaged observer with an accomplished literary imagination, the mountain forest is a complex, animated bio-community ?resonating with beauty and sentient beings, large, small, and mysterious. Mixing elements of realism and magical realism, humour and protest, and traditional and experimental forms, this volume offers a unique contribution to Canadian eco-poetry.
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The Fat Man Arpeggios
by Pellegrino D'Acierno
Part of the Essential Poets series
In The Fat Man Arpeggios, Pellegrino D'Acierno presents a ludic portrait of the Fat Man ? a metaphysical dandy and ?foolosopher? ? who voices, through the lightness of arpeggios, his existential and amorous dilemmas.
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In Your Crib
by Austin Clarke
Part of the Essential Poets series
Two black men: the poet, an elder and veteran of last century's civil rights movement; and a nameless youth, swaggering and beltless, seduced by guns-and-gangs and expensive cars, and perpetually targeted by police. They are brothers by the colour of their skin, neighbours in the same "crib," yet separated by a lifetime of experience. Invoking memories of his personal encounters with leaders like Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael and Amiri Baraka, the poet berates his heir for dropping the torch, and regrets his own failure to protect, inspire and speak out on the young man?s behalf. In the tradition of Bob Marley's "Redemption Song," In Your Crib is a lyrical plea, both indictment and lamentation, and a powerful account of the ongoing struggle for racial equality.
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Mask
by Elana Wolff
Part of the Essential Poets series
Weaving homage and history, this collection of poetry was inspired by the life of Charlotte Saloman, the Berlin-born artist who perished at Auschwitz. Saloman was the author of Life? or Theatre?, an evocative fictionalized autobiography in paint that Saloman described as a means of conquering death. Bringing together biography and imagination, the conceptual lyrics in this collection evoke a terrible moment in history and celebrate a life that triumphed despite adversity.
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The Fertile Crescent
by Karen Shenfeld
Part of the Essential Poets series
Ancient and medieval Jewish travelers are brought to poetic life amidst images garnered from the poet's personal journeys crossing the Sahara Desert and voyaging down the Congo River. This title is number 135 of the Essential Poets Series.
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Newer Lies
by Dan Jalowica
Part of the Essential Poets series
These meticulous, skillful, and endlessly revealing poems are astounding in their restraint and delicate comprehension of the natural world. Minimal language and brief verses contribute to the precise imagery illustrated in these gorgeously spare narrative lyrics.
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The Moon Knows No Boundary
by Mary Tilberg
Part of the Essential Poets series
The poems in this collection describe the survival of love and family during times of war. Spanning early-20th-century Russia to the present day, each war and upheaval is described as both a failure of peace and another step backward. The deeply antiwar poems attest to the survival of human love and the creative spirit during the most trying times.
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Italian Women and Other Tragedies
62
by Gianna Patriarca
Part of the Essential Poets series
This book is the first part of Patriarca's trilogy on Italian women. This book is in its third printing.
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We, the Women
by Merle Nudelman
Part of the Essential Poets series
The transformative power of love and spiritual awakening are explored in this richly textured second collection from award-winning poet Merle Nudelman. With imagery that is at once startling and evocative, poems of layered scenes of domesticity and the natural world border on the elegiac. Nudelman artfully probes the nuances and vagaries which define relationships and the shifting moments of lover, abuser, victim, and healer.
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