Review Online

My review of Garth Martens' debut collection, Prologue for the Age of Consequence is now up at the Arc Poetry Magazine site.

Sum Reviewed

Quill & Quire has posted Jason Wiens' review of my new book on their website.

Sunday Poem

My poem, "The Wound," from my brand new book, is the Sunday Poem over on the Vehicule Press Blog.

Article Online

A promotional piece I wrote for the Literary Press Group's "All Lit Up" blog has just been posted. Not something I usually do: a)a promo article and b)write about prose fiction. But these are four really enjoyable collections of not-quite-usual stories, so I was glad to have the chance to shed a bit of virtual ink on them.

Bard Battles

In my near-total neglect of this blog--and in my war-on-many-fronts busyness--I failed to mention that I was reading last night at the annual Poetry Now Battle of the Bards at Harbourfront in Toronto. Well, I was. And it went well. A very solid set of readers. I did not win--that honour went to Talya Rubin, and well deserved--but I was among five readers (including Kate Hargreaves, who has designed my last two books, Liz Worth and Deanna Young) chosen to appear at the International Festival of Authors in the fall. I did this back in 2011, and it's quite the event, so I'm pleased and honoured to have been selected again.

Last night was also my first opportunity to hold a copy of the new book, thanks to Kate picking up a few, still warm from the press at Coach House. It's pretty damn beautiful and I feel very fortunate.

Susan G. Cole, who hosted last night's show, did a nice little write-up on it today. I chose to go with a single longer poem and read my dramatic monologue "Achromatope," which is based on Oliver Sacks's story "The Colourblind Painter." If there was "moving melancholy" in my reading, it's probably in part because I was thinking all day about Sacks's recent diagnosis of terminal cancer. Though I once received correspondence from Dr. Sacks after I sent him a broadside print of "Achromatope," I can't claim to know the man, so I didn't feel comfortable dedicating the reading to him, but in retrospect that was dumb. So when I read it again at Harbourfront, I will dedicate it to him.

HOW IT CAME ON

Not consistent, but in
clusters, in lacustrine


conglomerations, in lack
lustre congress, in lacunar


conundrums, drums
con sordino, in schools


of sardine shoaling
in shallows, in shadows


and splotches of sickled
shivelight, in shimmers


and speckles, in specks,
freckles and moles, in tunnels


and tubes, in tubs and tubas
and turbines, in turbot's


turbercles, in tubercular
fits, in fletches, flitches


and flits, in flatlands
and mesas, in ditches,


in dikes, in tidal insistence,
in bridles and britches,


in fasces and faces, in flashes
and flexes and fluxion, in fluent


dysrhythmia, flaring
and falling, setting fire


to synapses and scuttling
sense to its apsis.

Lisa Robertson on Meter

Counting syllables really trained me to carry my ear down to that micro level of attention. I spend a lot of time counting syllables. For a while I had to stop myself from counting syllables when people spoke.

Masterful!

Brian Campbell has reviewed Career Limiting Moves, the book, for Rover Arts. Check it out.

Review reprinted

My review of Ricardo Sternberg's collection Some Dance, originally published in Vallum, has been reprinted in the latest issue of FreeFall. I'm practically a syndicated columnist!

Elise Partridge, 1958-2015

I learned yesterday that my dear friend Elise Partridge has died. I knew her time was running out--I'd known it for almost a year--but I was really hoping she'd hang in long enough to see her final book come off the press this spring. Knowing this was coming in no way makes it less painful for those who knew and loved her--for me--but given how much pain and suffering she'd already been through, there is some comfort in the thought that she need endure no more of it.

As word got out about Elise's death on social media yesterday, many people wrote of how kind she was. And she was. Elise wasn't that awful thing--a "nice" person--she was a person of great spirit, authentically generous in a way that no nice person is. I first met her, briefly, in March 2006, when I did a reading in Vancouver. She introduced herself to me after the reading, said a few enthusiastic words and, as I recall, left precipitously. She seemed unaccountably anxious. Not long after, I had an email from her apologizing that she was "ridiculously shy when meeting new people." She said a few lovely things about my poems and about my review work. And her comments weren't merely perfunctory compliments, of the sort one encounters all too often in any collegial environment, but the kind of sharp, perceptive observations that can only be the product of thoughtful attention. Not long after that, Elise wrote to offer me a complimentary subscription to the London Review of Books, a perk her husband Steve (a medievalist in the UBC English department) had acquired in exchange for writing a review for LRB. She thought, rightly, that the high quality long-form reviews in LRB would appeal to me.

When I moved to Vancouver from Halifax the following year, Elise did more than any other person (outside of Rachel's family) to welcome me to the city. She invited me to become a member of the Poetry Dogs, a semi-regular reading circle that would meet at a member's house to discuss whatever poems people had brought along. Members, besides Elise and Steve, included Barbara Nickel, Stephanie Bolster, John Donlan, George McWhirter, Christopher Patton and, later, Matt Rader. The only condition was that they had to be someone else's poems, someone not a member of Dogs. It was in Dogs sessions that I really learned how acute and uncompromising a reader Elise was. Anyone who came under her tutelage--as when she was poet-in-residence for Arc Poetry Magazine--could only have come away with their poems much improved.

Elise was someone who was more intimate with death than anyone in the First World should have to be, but something that distinguished her personality, and the poetry that was so much a product of it, was her refusal to be gloomy in the face of death. She would never have agreed with Larkin that "death is no different whined at than withstood." And she never succumbed to despair. Her oeuvre is full of poems about death, but they are playful, virtuosic poems, acts of resistance, testament to the size of her spirit, the defiance of her breath.

In an early email to me, she was irked by a reviewer who had "insulted [her] character and artistic integrity by charging [her] with 'trying to dazzle.'" She ended that letter with a piece of advice for me: "If you ever get slandered with the show-off label, my suggestion is to reply, 'I'm not TRYING to dazzle--ah just DOES!'" And she did. I miss her already, but she has left so much behind.

Plus ça change

Wordsworth, on Robert Southey's unfavourable review of Lyrical Ballads: 

"He knew that money was of importance to me. If he could not conscientiously have spoken differently of the volume, he ought to have declined the task of reviewing it."

THE PROOF OF THE GRAPE

The index of a vintage
is the season's history: how many
photons have fallen

through the skin. Equations
predict excellence. Unlike
the nose of connoisseurs,

the maths involved
are flawless, however
maculate the soil.

Deprive the vine of water,
it will eke its taproot deeper
down through solid strata

where it draws not only
succour for the turgor
of its foliage and fruit,

but hauls up half-formed
metaphors from minerals
lying latent in the clay,

imparts them to the grape
flesh where they mingle
and intensify as the sun-

washed clusters ripen.
These metaphors remain
embryonic until tongue

-cognized and -constituted
by a seasoned sommelier
who nearly knows them flawlessly.

The index of a vintage,
however reason may explain it,
retains intrinsic mystery—

the grape escapes its proof.

The Rage of Extemporary Criticism

As it very seldom happens that the rage of extemporary criticism inflicts fatal or lasting wounds, I know not that the Laws of benevolence entitle this distress to much sympathy. The diversion of baiting an author has the sanction of all ages and nations, and is more lawful than the sport of teasing other animals, because for the most part he comes voluntarily to the stake, furnished, as he imagines, by the patron powers of literature with resistless weapons and impenetrable armour, with the mail of the boar of Erymanth, and the paws of the lion of Nemea.

                      -Samuel Johnson

ZW on Patreon

Happy new year, everybody. Impressed by the concept and by the results people have achieved using the crowd-funding patronage site Patreon, I've decided to set up my own page. As I state on the page, I am not doing this because I need the funding, but so that people who enjoy/admire my writing can support it directly if they're willing and able. Any support is enormously appreciated, much of it will be paid forward to other artists, and I've built in considerable quid pro quo "rewards" for anyone who does chip in a few drachmas. This isn't something I'll be flogging on an ongoing basis; I just wanted to set it up and let people know about it this once. I have set a "milestone goal," but that's more day-dream than ambition; I shall by no means be disappointed if I never meet it.

Mark Sampson's Year in Review

My old friend Mark Sampson has also included CLM in his ten favourite books of 2014. Thanks, Mark!

Brian Palmu on CLM and Cottonopolis

I'm not a big fan of book-biz year-end best-of lists in general, but there are better ways it can be done. Brian Palmu has listed his favourite books of 2014, but, refreshingly, these are books he read this year, rather than books published this year. He also doesn't stop after he's reached an arbitrary number of "best books." And, pleasingly to this household, he has included my book of essays and Rachel's Cottonopolis.

McMANSION

Welcome to your turnkey cul-de-sac,
where faux Tudors and ersatz cedar-sided
colonials sprawl cheek by jowl, and back

on a hemlock-shaded ravine: your own private
wilderness oasis and buffer against the berm-
baffled traffic beyond. This ticky-tacky

facsimile is the acme of blandeur:
gauche rooflines, cultured stone and off-the-rack
opulencies galore—all the doo-dads

and knick-knacks the status anxiety
of your executive lifestyle demands,
and priced to move fast. This high society

dream could be yours, but it won't last.

A Quiet Tryst of Living Voices

Our poems are conversations in every meaningful sense. They are an exchange between ourselves and those parts of ourselves that belong to other people. Intimate whisperings, productive tensions. They challenge and tease us, lead us to say things that we have not thought to say. They gives the courage to have a self and to lose it too, which is surely the most we can ask of any conversation.
...
We are made up of voice and we are the relations between voices, inside and out. They are our judgement and our redemption, our ipseity and our selflessness, our origin and our promise. Perhaps their revelation is possible in real conversation. It may be, after all, what we live for. As Yeats says, "what do we know but that we face / one another in this place?" I suppose there will always be something ethereal and unreal about conversations as long as I feel as anxious about them as I do. But in every ghostly encounter--the ones we have with friends at Tim Hortons and the ones we listen for when we write--we recognize the voices we love and think: it is good of them to come back the way they do and share a part of themselves with us, good to hear them again. And our hearts warm to a quiet tryst of living voices, ones that, if we are lucky, will choir among themselves long afterward.

--Jeffery Donaldson, "Ghostly Conversations," from Echo Soundings: Essays on Poetry and Poetics

New book next spring

So, I have a new book of poems coming out in the spring. The final edits have been submitted for typesetting and design work is underway. Here is one potential cover idea crafted by Biblioasis designer Kate Hargreaves. Not final, but I quite like it.

Essay online

I have just discovered that an essay on Elizabeth Bishop's "The Bight" that I published in The Worcester Review a few years ago has been uploaded to the interwebs. So you can read it, if you like to read such things.