No Ordinary Place
No Ordinary Place
by Pamela Porter
$15.95
- February 2012
- print ISBN: 978-1-55380-122-1
- ebook ISBN: 978-1-55380-152-8
- PDF ISBN: 978-1-55380-172-6
- 6″ x 9″ Trade Paperback, 106 pages
- Poetry
- Out of print
Pamela Porter’s poems celebrate a world awaiting discovery. She opens this new collection with a poem entitled “An Offering” in which she brings to the ceremony “poems / for every season — of dreams born, / burning, broken” and, in particular, one that “begins like a perilous grace” to develop as “naked and tender and wanting.” Throughout, one hears and sees images that connect both the poet and reader to other dimensions. Always for Porter, there is the moment tentatively coming into being where the mundane is transformed into something totally unexpected and otherworldly. The image can be one that develops from the natural world as in “Branches, Early Spring,” where she sees how “the trees’ red sap set the sky on fire.” Another poem based in nature is “Naming” in which “small birds life into the sky / holding in their beaks / the words we don’t need to say.” Throughout, Porter’s poems celebrate moments when we experience “the beginning of the world again.”
Click here to read an excerpt from No Ordinary Place.
Reviews & Awards:
- Shortlisted for the 2013 Raymond Souster Award by the League of Canadian Poets
“Porter’s poems are direct, clear, narrative in intent, yet embedded with dazzling imagery that brings scenes fully alive.”
—Canadian Bookseller“In Pamela Porter’s . . . No Ordinary Place, enclosures, gardens, paths, homes, barns, orchards, and pastures—places generally thought of as ordinary or, at times, empty or abandoned—are enriched. . . . Our perception of place is heightened through Porter’s language, so that the overlooked is made visible. . . . It is the care in these poems toward the living that I will most remember, be it toward humming-bird or human.”
—Heather Jessup, The Malahat Review“The strength of this collection lies in Porter’s ability to take the familiar, even ordinary, and show how special it is. And by doing so, she shows that the world is anything but ordinary.”
—Candace Fertile, The Times Colonist“Pamela Porter’s fourth book of poetry has focus and form that results from her maturity as an artist; the poet’s confident voice and finely crafted stanzas command the reader’s attention as much as her subject matter.”
—Quill & Quire“Porter constantly surprises, sharing with us a world in which conventional lines are blurred and the most ordinary thing can, in a breath, or with a word, be transformed into something extraordinary. Past, present and future seem only marginally separated in this world…. Porter weaves a stunning web of imagery that holds the reader captive from beginning to end.”
—Story Circle Book Reviews“Pamela Porter finally discovers that special place in No Ordinary Place.”
—Geist“These poems are rich in experience, they are the tale of life lived looking at the world in wonder, they are textured and they are polished. . . . Pamela Porter has mastered the most difficult aspect of poetry – she makes it look easy, the best poets do.”
—Michael Dennis
