Ronsdale Press » Poetry

No Ordinary Place

ronsdale — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 19:08:22 +0000

No Ordinary Place

by Pamela Porter

$15.95

Available February 2012
ISBN 978-1-55380-151-1
ebook ISBN 978-1-55380-122-1
6″ x 9″ Trade Paperback, 106 pages
Poetry

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.”

“Porter’s poems are direct, clear, narrative in intent, yet embedded with dazzling imagery that brings scenes fully alive.” — Canadian Bookseller

Other Ronsdale books by Pamela Porter:

Cathedral

Runaway Dreams

ronsdale — Fri, 01 Apr 2011 21:55:57 +0000

Runaway Dreams

by Richard Wagamese

$15.95

July 2011
ISBN 978-1-55380-129-0
ebook ISBN 978-1-55380-135-1
6″ x 9″ Trade Paperback, 138 pages
Poetry

Having developed an impressive reputation for his many novels and non-fiction works, Richard Wagamese now presents a collection of stunning poems ranging over a broad landscape. He begins with an immersion in the unforgettable world where “the ancient ones stand at your shoulder . . . making you a circle / containing everything.”

These are Medicine teachings told from the experience of one who lived and still lives them. He also describes his life on the road when he repeatedly ran away at an early age, and the beatings he received when the authorities tried “to beat the Indian right out of me.” Yet even in the most desperate situations, Wagamese shows us Canada as seen through the eyes and soul of a well-worn traveller, with his love of country, his love of people. Through it all, there are poems of love and music, the language sensuous and tender.

“In Runaway Dreams, Richard Wagamese astounds us with his poetic breadth and spiritual alertness. He is equally comfortable and impressive writing about nature, love, jazz, spirituality, or the brutality of residential schools.”
— Robert Hilles, Governor General Winner for Cantos from a Small Room

Click here to read an excerpt from The Canada Poem

The Canada Poem

VI
Looking out across the lake and seeing
how the mist seems to hold it all together
so that even the loon calls seem connected
to the side of the mountain standing
tall and proud as a chief
or a medicine woman
the forest dropping to the shore
like the fringes of buckskin the stone
of the cliff at the turn of the lake
a shining bead in the flare of the rising sun

it all comes together of its own accord
and all you can do is stand here
and take it in and hold it like a breath
you never want to exhale
these radiant shining moments
that have come to be the foundation
of your time here

when you think of this country now
it becomes as perfect as this vista
this lake and these mountains stunning
in the magnitude of the force of them
resting together on the power of detail

like when you watch your wife cutting
glass for the art she forms with a kiln
seeing how the minute bits of silica
fused together become something more
by virtue of the vision she has
of their wholeness

her story began on a convict ship bound
for the shores of Western Australia
and continued in the buying and the selling
of her great-grandmother on a Fremantle dock
a West Indian black whose face you see
in the line of her face when the light
catches it just so or the direct way
she has of looking at you telling you
with the strength of that level gaze
that the chains that bind her to the past
are forged from love and the knowledge
that her story, her life, is not just what
you see but the sum of its parts
like a lake shining at the foot of a mountain

your story began in a residential school
in northwestern Ontario where your family
was hung upon a cross of doctrine
that said to save the child they must
kill the Indian first — and did almost
except that you were born
in a canvas army tent in a trap-line camp
set beside the crooked water of the Winnipeg River
tucked in a cradleboard on a bed of spruce and cedar
hearing the Old Talk cooed and whispered
by the grandmother who could not save
you in the end from being
scooped away and taken to a white world
where the Indian was scraped away
and the rawness and the woundings
at your belly seeped and bled
their poisons into you for years

both of you adopted
removed
from the shelter of arms
that held you first
the story of you edited
by crude punctuation

and the journeys that you took from there
led you to extraordinary places of dark
and light and all shades in between
the acts of discovery and reclamation
adding to the image you hold now
both of you willing to tell it to each other
so that you know that what makes you stronger
is the coming together of those stories
the union of your lives the harmony that happens
when the weave of things is allowed to blend
all on its own accord
a confluence of energy and spirit
that the Old Ones say occurs without any help from us
the detail of things defined by Creator’s purpose
and fused together into wholeness
like a lake shining at the foot of a mountain

so you look across this stretch of Canada
and it’s as if you can feel the whole of it
shimmer beneath your feet like the locomotive
thunder of a hundred thousand hooves of buffalo
charging into history
or the skin of a great drum beating
carried in the feet of young men dancing
grasses flat for the gathering of people
come to celebrate the sun
and the wind that blows across the water
becomes the same wind that blew across
the gritty, dusty faces of settler folk freed
from the yoke of Europe the tribe of them
following the creak of wagon wheels
forward into a history shared
by diverse peoples with wondrous stories
told around fires
that kept them sheltered from the night

so maybe this is what it comes to mean
this word, this name, this Kanata
the Huron word for village that has
come to mean “our home”
maybe in the end it’s a word for one fire
burning where a circle of people gathers
to hear the stories that define them

Click here to close the book excerpt.

Reviews

“The poems in Runaway are introspective but not self-absorbed, intimate, nature imbued, respectful and reverent.” — BC Bookworld

“If I had to make a comparision, I would consider Wagamese, with his opposition to the prevailing culture of our time, in line with Allen Ginsberg, with a mission to uphold the ‘beaten down’ and oppressed of society. To some extent, Wagamese is incomparable because of his unique talent and singular frame of reference.” — Anne Burke, The Prairie Journal

“His style is free. It resembles prose and thought – the runaway thinking of us all.” — Joyce Atcheson, Anishinabek News

Beckett Soundings

ronsdale — Tue, 07 Dec 2010 21:11:05 +0000

Beckett Soundings

by Inge Israel

$15.95

March 2011
ISBN 978-1-55380-112-2
ebook ISBN 978-1-55380-123-8
6″ x 9″ Trade Paperback, 100 pages
Poetry

In this collection of poems, Inge Israel works through Samuel Beckett’s letters, his biographies and his actual plays and novels to probe the imagination that created his artistic works. Arguably the pre-eminent avant-garde and most influential writer of the 20th century and a legend in his own time, Beckett presents many glaring paradoxes.

Beckett was born in a country ruled by the Catholic Church yet raised by a strict and devoutly Protestant mother. He loved the King James Bible and knew long passages of it by heart but did not believe in it. He loved his mother but fought to free himself of her influence. He loved Ireland but left to live in France. He loved the classics yet despaired of language being able to express anything meaningful.

He dearly loved to be in the company of close friends yet even in their midst remained a solitary man, almost misanthropic. His outlook was gloomy, but he also had a streak of humour. Israel’s poems open a new and remarkable window on this writer of many contradictions.

Click here to read a poem from Beckett Soundings

The Stake

Of the mother tongue, so aptly
named, every syllable pulls
and tugs till, desperate, you can
only think: Away!

away to another language
with no strings.
A clean break. That’s far enough,
you think, enough is plenty

but find it isn’t, for you go on
looking under the bed, outside
your door, scanning the night
beyond for freedom
like a goat still tied
to its stake though it has pulled
it up and now must drag it along
at every step.

Click here to close the book excerpt.

Also by Inge Israel:

Poems for a New World

ronsdale — Fri, 17 Sep 2010 19:44:23 +0000

Poems for a New World

by Connie Fife

$13.95

Autumn 2001
ISBN 978-0-921870-90-6 (0-921870-90-6)
5-1/4″ x 7-5/8″ Trade Paperback, 88 pages
Poetry, Native Studies, Women’s Studies

Connie Fife is one of Canada’s warrior poets. Poems for a New World, her third book of poems, refuses to take prisoners. She writes of Oka and Gustafson Lake, of the police shooting of a Native mother and child, as well as the NATO genocide in Yugoslavia. Reflecting on her own life, she carves out a space for new forms of loving that will act as a transforming force for people of all colours so that they may breathe the air of freedom, the air of a world rich in biodiversity.

Revolutionary as they may be, these poems also care about language, about how language can become the food and joy of life. As she says, “I have prepared a bowl of ripened poems / with which to ease our hunger,” placed an “empty gourd” beside the bed of love which waits “to be filled by our stories carried / across the heartlands of distance we will have travelled.” These are poems of revolution, of love, of inspiration.

“Poems for a New World pulses with an erotic politics that will take you into new countries of the flesh and mind.”
— Jeanette Armstrong

“Connie’s songs will transport you on a beautiful journey into the soul of a powerful and passionate Cree woman.”
— Chrystos

“Listen well. You’ll hear the blossoming of a tree born from the parts of a broken heart.”
— Joy Harjo

Unmarked Doors

ronsdale — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 18:37:27 +0000

Unmarked Doors

by Inge Israel

$10.95

Autumn 1992
ISBN 978-0-921870-16-6 (0-921870-16-7)
6″ x 9″ Trade Paperback, 90 pages
Poetry

In this rich collection of new poems, Inge Israel draws upon the many voices of her past — Russian, German, Danish, Irish, French and English — to open some of history’s unmarked doors. Among her most powerful recreations is that of Nora Joyce, in a dramatic monologue that shows us her famous husband in a wholly new light.

“There is a freshness, humour and compassion about these pieces”
— Christopher Fitz-Simon, Abbey Theatre, Dublin

“Unmarked Doors is Inge Israel’s best collection to date. Her dramatic monologue with Nora Joyce is the clearest lens on the creative conciousness that I have seen since Valéry’s Monsieur Teste.”
— J. Michael Yates

“gossamer-like, yet highly perceptive with haunting musical diction.”
— The Edmonton Journal

Also by Inge Israel:

Cathedral

ronsdale — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 22:50:56 +0000

Cathedral

by Pamela Porter

$15.95

Autumn 2010
ISBN 978-1-55380-106-1
ebook ISBN 978-1-55380-118-4
6″ x 9″ Trade Paperback, 100 pages
Poetry

Finalist! Pat Lowther Memorial Award 2011

This collection of poems takes us on a journey — a very personal journey of Pamela Porter’s own — to Africa and South America, those corners of the world the news reports never seem to cover: to Angola’s thirty-year-long civil war, a landscape overrun with poverty, AIDS, and infant mortality; and to the struggles of ordinary people still haunted by the past horrors of Argentina’s “dirty war.”

With language deceptively simple, filled with music, colour and rich detail, Porter writes with grace and compassion, making a fierce beauty from all she sees, celebrating the resilience of the poor and oppressed, who nonetheless remain determined to live their lives with dignity and with joy.

Winner of the Governor General’s Award for The Crazy Man, Pamela Porter has given us another book to treasure, one that takes us into the heart of what it means to be a human being on this earth.

“Porter’s poems are pervaded with a sense of grace, of mercy, beauty and benediction.”
— M. Travis Lane

Click here for a sample from Cathedral

Photograph of Earth from Space

On the outskirts of Luanda, Angola,
Gerald Nduma has walked an hour to school
carrying his chair, which is really
an empty coffee can. Nine years old,
he holds in his other hand a mango,
which will be his lunch. At school,
which is really a tree, Gerald
places his lunch beneath his chair.
This day, a missionary has come
with magazines. Gerald takes what
is given him. Soon he does not hear
his teacher’s instructions. He does not hear
the students’ chatter. He is looking
at the photograph of Earth
floating in a dark sea
which Gerald imagines
is plenteous with fish.

Happiness in Ghana

The morning is a new egg.
Roosters cannot keep the secret.
Not yet sunrise,
lizards go about their business
scraping walls with their little nails.
Already in the dark, a child with braids
erupting like fountains all over her head
brushes her teeth in the next yard.
Women and girls will load up their heads
and walk and walk to the centre of town,
the street thickening with the scent
of pineapple and sewage.
We rub our eyes. Sun is rising.
All night water has trickled into the tank;
time to start the motor, pump water
up to the tank that sits like a hat
on the roof of our house.
The child with clean teeth helps her mother,
a sandal seller, fill a tub with sandals. Crammed
like crayons in their box, the sandals might
bear names on their thin sides: Tomato. Papaya.
Sky. Moonrise and Murky Dawn.
The motor growls like a lion.
Our children crane their necks like lizards,
sun gleaming their eyes.
As the woman raises her tub arm’s length
over her head, the water tank overflows,
a sudden rainstorm. The children squeal
and jump. They must tell Thomas, who has arrived
pushing his motorbike, delivering a crate
of pop in bottles. The bottles dance.
The woman with sandals on her head
starts down the road, but she walks too close
to the wall; all we see is a tub of colours washing by.
Then comes a display case laden with pastries;
later, a sewing machine, toothbrushes
and toothpaste: tub of dental hygiene.
While he’s here, Thomas will iron the pyjamas.
Tonight the two pink children
will go to bed clean and crisp. No matter
that they’ll wake rumpled
from sleeping in the night’s open mouth,
from dreams of home. The women
will wake again before dawn,
balancing the day on their heads.

Peppers: Living in Ghana

If the truck does not start, if it
ignores you as though asleep,
lift the hood,
pluck out the yellow wire
and scrape it against the battery.
Immediately
you will wake the car.
Every morning
a man with pants torn to the knees
arrives to coerce water out of buckets
and onto the plants. He tips
the bucket, nudges water with his hands
as one might urge a child to play.
Therefore
we have flowers; we have peppers
which the young watchman, Anthony,
hands us in his exhausted cup —
breakfast, red as stoplights.
He imagines us wanting without peppers.
Beatrice, elegant girl
with a short wool of hair, gold
in her ears shining like moons
and shoes roomy as canoes,
shyly rattles our door
and finds us sweating into our hot chocolate,
peppers blooming on the table.
Cecilia, who aches for earrings, rushes out
with Beatrice into a river of school uniforms
and the sharp snag of bell.
In Africa’s denominations
she calls attention in her translucent skin,
a continent of hair
plunging down the map of her back.
Children call her; women
bring babies to see her, rare
and blushing as ripening fruit.
Our son desires merely
the habit of parents,
wants neither bumpy blackboards
nor desks risky with splinters.
He hides under his hat, face
bright as a pepper.
But the fruits that sting his eyes
hold seeds of good luck.
He tastes the air.
He chews on Africa.
Dusty sandals slapped to his feet,
he scales the seat of the truck — dead-still, asleep.
Anthony leans into the gate that groans
with the weight of a new day
already old as centuries.
Packed elbow to elbow on unruly springs,
we hold our breath.
Tail lights fire.
Luck smiles on us.
The truck clears its throat, then sings.

Click here to close the book excerpt.

Reviews

“The first thing to admire in Cathedral is the poetry itself. Porter’s lines are direct, clear, narrative in intent, yet embedded with dazzling imagery that brings scenes fully alive.”
— Canadian bookseller

“The photograph on the cover of Cathedral is a fitting image for Pamela Porter’s soulful poems of praise to the vivid and exquisite details of day-to-day. In the first poem in this beautifully crafted collection, “Photograph of Earth from Space,” a poet’s powerful eye sees a nine-year-old boy carrying an empty coffee can and a mango to a tree where he will sit with a missionary who shows him magazines. … How wondrous is the pure simplicity of this poet’s words to tell a story rich, yet with so few words.”
— Story Circle Book Reviews

Dead Can’t Dance, The

ronsdale — Fri, 21 May 2010 19:24:07 +0000

The Dead Can’t Dance

by Pam Calabrese MacLean

$15.95

Autumn 2009
ISBN 978-1-55380-069-9
6″ x 9″ Trade Paperback, 132 pages
Poetry

With a mother’s touch, a lover’s touch and the sure hand of an undertaker, Pam Calabrese MacLean compels the reader to take a dangerous look behind every façade, even though we will long to look away. Her women are fierce with their men, protective of their children and abrupt with the world. She observes the minutiae of life with an eye of appreciation, and looks at the grandeur with suspicion.

MacLean’s love poems are blunt instruments, ready to strike: “So far I’ve loved men / whose names are short / for nothing. / Kent. / Luke. / Kirk. / Quick blunt pokes / of sound.” Throughout these poems, MacLean offers up a solid understanding of what death leaves behind: death of dreams, death of desire, death of a beloved. Always we are “Left holding nothing, / surprised by the weight of it.”

MacLean’s poems are unforgettable landscapes of grief and tenderness with just enough wicked wit to plunge the reader into new insights on what it means to be alive.

“In these wild, funny and brave poems, Pam Calabrese MacLean — a sorceress of the ordinary world — goes into your own memory and finds those you’ve lost, those you’ve loved, and those who swung you around and around until you were blazing with joy.”
— Anne Simpson

“Here are poems that carry their readers along with slow confidence and leave us in silence, altered, with questions.”
— Stephanie Bolster

__________________________________________________________________________________________________

Reviews & Awards

Longlisted for ReLit Awards 2010

“Like the best parts of David Copperfield, after the death of Dora, MacLean’s poems are about the time after something”
— Atlantic Books Today

Skin Like Mine

ronsdale — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 00:21:36 +0000

Skin Like Mine

by Garry Gottfriedson

$15.95

Spring 2010
ISBN 978-1-55380-101-6
6″ x 9″ Trade Paperback, 122 pages
First Nations, Poetry

SHORTLISTED FOR THE CANADIAN AUTHORS ASSOCIATION AWARD FOR POETRY 2011

In Skin Like Mine Garry Gottfriedson offers a suite of poems that peel away the skin of contemporary first nations society to reveal an inside view of individual experience.

Gottfriedson speaks of “minds full of anticipation” yet with “tongues pointing arrowheads.” Today’s youth, he says, are “afraid of themselves.” He finds that both individuals and bands end in “tangles,” that they write “nonsense words in the sand” or exploit images painted on rocks, those “the postmodern Indian calls / visual poetic expression.”

As the collection continues, however, Gottfriedson’s love for the land emerges. He draws attention to the rape of the natural environment, the skin of Mother Earth, through clear-cut logging. He speaks of the damage caused by the pine beetle, of “forests being / eaten from the inside out.” And here it is that Gottfriedson introduces the mysterious Horsechild, who is to prepare the drying racks for the returning salmon “so that beneath your skin / the mountains will be forever abundant”: a prayer for us to protect the migrating salmon on their multi-year cycles, to protect the bears and eagles that feast upon them, so as to assure that the transformations will continue, that there will be abundance for both humans and the earth itself.

Click here to read a sample from Skin Like Mine

My Grandmothers

my grandmothers purled farewell
paused knowingly at the edge
whispered with luminous satisfaction
to souls waiting for greeting

they had done their work

in the unfettered fields and open spaces
the land where my ancestors’ bones are ground to dust
confidence was reborn
from fleeting echoes spiraling amid the sagebrush and cacti

they had done their work

from the common past retold
through dream-time and oral pass-downs,
the rebirth of recognition
solidified their commitment and mine

they had done their work

for the betterment of future life-givers
my grandmothers cleansed the re-constructed landscape
kept the remains pure
despite the underhanded politicians extorting land

they had done their work

the landscape nearly disappeared
under the weight of barbwire fences
but the dust of my grandmothers still blows between the barbs
and I hear them whispering the names of my grandchildren

they had done their work

Skin like Mine

you wear your skin like mine
kerosene sweat dripping
flooding angry refutation
brown and proud
complexion forever drenched in self-pity

I see you as you are
we are the same person
minds full of anticipation
tongues pointing arrowheads
feet ready to kick mule-quick
hearts engulfed

this is the result of something gone stupid
we are stupid

we crushed up potential
filled our days with junk
punched arms and legs
clung to wrinkled stories long gone
hid deep within waste
blamed others for our weaknesses
denied others our goodness
fell in love with stupidity

afraid to live
afraid to die
afraid of ourselves

Puerto Vallarta

cobble stone streets stitch zigzags
along the hillsides, offshore the ocean
etching remnants of long-ago inlaid blood
left by Spaniards and aboriginal warriors
antiquated whispers rattle in the background
hidden behind the roar of the Pacific

the homeboys don’t remember
when this fat empire was opened up
to the new world
for missionaries and tourists alike
but the beaches crawl naked bodies
as Central American refugees barter on
bent knees to forget fading faith
they stare stone-faced into the blue eyes
of corpulent tourists shading under palm huts
drinking cerveza
ghosts from a different time hide on Gringo Street
past dignity, acceptance and demoralization

I cannot close my eyes long enough to
blink away disenchantment
but I feel the valves in my heart choking
a coward in your land
I hide, clinging to a beer
acting like a white man

Moon Fractions

the night sky crawls yellow in
Taiwan as it does in Italy
and for that matter, here too, on
the starlit crazy rez shaping
fractions to keep white
folk dizzy with mis-
calculations

I love that, but love is useless in
poetry, so I dream words in
somnolent shades and start again

I re-create rocks dripping
salt water from sea-smashed waves,
writing nonsense words in the sand
dunes left when the tide runs back
to the other side of the world

but on the desert rez, there are no sea-sand
words to imagine, only those written in the skin
of birch trees, those painted in rocks
that the post-modern Indian calls
visual poetic expression

the ancestors have always left
a stone impression on the visitors
just as we do today
how little things change

our blood drips on
the sidewalks late at night
sometimes even in the bright daylight,
our visitors stare down
at us leaving footprints forever
etched within each wrinkle, every line of
the living stories we tell through our eyes
patterns of sand pounded across oceans in
Taiwan or Italy or on the shores of
this country where rocks and gravel grind
to dust glimmering on moonlit nights
waiting for someone to
dream them to life

Click here to close the book excerpt.

Also by Garry Gottfriedson:

Whiskey Bullets: Cowboy and Indian Heritage Poems

Reviews

“A beautiful and complex collection of poems.”
— CM Magazine

“This is a poet who cannot be pinned down. . . . Accessible plain talk, not literary poetry, with terrific speech rhythms. . . .These poems describe a wide emotional arc. . . . Skin Like Mine is an eye opener.”
— BC BookWorld

“Politically potent, culturally contemporary, and sensually seductive, as images of crows, sky, dance, and horses work to touch the surface of and get beneath our various scarred and weathered skins.”
— Prairie books NOW

“A mesmerizing cacophony of identity. . . . Skin Like Mine is so finely crafted that it will fascinate new and experienced readers of First Nations literature.” — Canadian Literature

From Green to Gold: New & Selected Poems

ronsdale — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 23:27:44 +0000

From Green to Gold

New & Selected Poems

by Harold Enrico

$15.95

Spring 2009
ISBN 978-1-55380-067-5
6″ x 9″ Trade Paperback, 154 pages
Poetry

Harold Enrico is that rare poet who combines the deepest traditions of our history, our spirituality, with the colourful imagery of the Pacific Northwest. Enrico’s poetry has been selected for Chicago’s Poetry Magazine and acclaimed by Theodore Roethke, George Woodcock and Choice magazine.

From Green to Gold contains the finest poems from Enrico’s four earlier collections — Now, a Thousand Years from Now, Rip Current, Dog Star and A Second Earth — along with a substantial selection of new poems.

MIDSUMMER PAST

At nightfall we sat in the orchard
and talked beneath the apple trees,
listened to the owl in the cedar
and to our voices lost in the leaves,
thought of the fruit unripened
weighing down the loaded boughs,
heard thunder in the mountains,
felt the warmth rising from the ground,
understood the labour of the root
undoing layers of rock,
felt the strength of darkness
prying open the bones of the earth.

“I believe that his very best work in poetry is as good as any I have seen in English.”
— Theodore Roethke

“Enrico pays homage to artistic community with a mastery which always remains contemporary.”
— Choice

“His intellect is vital and seemingly fearless.”
— Northwest Review

“A superb poet.”
— Vancouver Sun

Also by Harold Enrico:

__________________________________________________________________________________________________

Reviews

“I experienced a sense of melancholy and an awareness of the beauty of every moment as I read the poems. . . . From Green to Gold is a collection of poems that prompted images of beauty and caused me to think about nature, art, war and aging. Its eco-friendly printing only lives out the underlying message of the collection, that our world and lives are wondrous.”
— Bookstorepeople.com

Writing the Tides: New and Selected Poems

ronsdale — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 04:12:21 +0000

Writing the Tides

New and Selected Poems

by Kevin Roberts

$16.95

Spring 2006
ISBN 978-155380-036-1 (1-55380-036-2)
6″ x 9″ Trade Paperback, 208 pages
Poetry

Speaking of Kevin Roberts, the Australian writer Nigel Krauth says, “Roberts takes the common man’s point of view and proves that humanity is still connected to the great turning of the universe.” Certainly this “New and Selected” provides ample evidence of Roberts’ sense of connectedness, as he selects the best from his previous eleven books of poetry and shows that for over thirty years he has been one of the more powerful voices on the Canadian scene.

Like Ted Hughes, Roberts frequently employs strong images of the countryside to explore the human condition – as in his earliest volume, Cariboo Fishing Notes (1973), where he works the trout streams of the Cariboo for what the art of fishing reveals of philosophical stances. Roberts also explores the work culture of Canada’s resource economy, as in Deep Line which tells of skippering a salmon trolling boat and “deep lining” the fish.

In S’ney’mos, Roberts widens his themes to document in poetic terms the coal mining history of Nanaimo and the effect mining had on the aboriginal people of the area. Stonefish takes Roberts into new territory in Tahiti, with a sequence of poems based on the life of Gauguin. In Cobalt 3, Roberts again opens up new territory when he offers a grim but blackly comic rendering of his own personal duel with cancer. With the addition of many new poems in Writing the Tides, Roberts shows that he is still at the top of his form.

“Kevin Roberts knows that beauty in poetry does not rest only in the image, but also in the energy of the poem. I read his poetry because he’s written the magic of deep water, and then gone further, exploring the line that floats between tragedy and living with attention.”
— Brian Brett

“Kevin Roberts’ poetry wages guerrilla warfare to keep our lives and language honest. You won’t find a straighter, deeper line than this to get into the mysterious depths of why we are here, why we need each other and why we have to soldier on. Great stuff!”
— Peter Such

“Kevin Roberts writes in the voice of a citizen of the world. His richly textured life is reflected in his writing, and nowhere more in evidence than in this, his book of both new and selected poems. There is an evenness of intensity to the poems in this collection which makes for smooth reading.”
— Heidi Greco

Also by Kevin Roberts:

Cobalt 3

__________________________________________________________________________________________________

Reviews

“Writing the Tides was one of the outstanding books of 2006.”
— Canadian Literature

“There is an evenness of intensity to the poems in this collection which makes for smooth reading.”
— Prairie Fire