An Ark of Koans

An Ark of Koans is a meditation on the mystery of what happens at the moment it happens. Although it takes animals as its threshold, animals only serve as innocent guides toward fathoming, if not understanding, events as small, inconceivable miracles.

"E.D. Blodgett's An Ark of Koans is a series of deeply meditative, zoological-themed quatrains by a typically sublime Edmonton-based, Governor General's Award-winning poet.The perfect chunks of verse in this book are almost holographic in nature, each snippet embodying its own complete poetic universe, plumbing philosophical depths without ever losing sight of everyday vernacular comfort....You can't ask for better bedside reading." Gilbert A. Bouchard, The Edmonton Journal

“ The thematic furniture is outsize—but they are handled so lightly and dreamily that the poems seem like so many snow—globes with their two or three primary elements falling in a soft flurry of words….These paragraphs offer a master-class on the use of repetition, or in other words, on how to walk elegantly in long dress without having to gather up the train of your own utterances and without once tripping. As the last line tells it, these poems turn continually upon themselves, which is what makes them mesmerizing.” Jeffery Davidson, Volume 75, Number 1, Winter 2006.

“These tiny quatrains are compressed meditations that expand in the mind to reveal glimpse after glimpse of a cosmic vision in which what happens in the world of animals resonates in the human world and in the realm of the divine. They have a kinship with cultural paradigms that reach back to a time before written language. Like the poems of Emily Dickinson and the songs of William Blake, their surprising energy is not the result of simple aggregation, but resides in and releases from the fact that the whole of Blodgett's poetic universe is present in each of its parts.” George Amabile

"The poems in An Ark of Koans can be read simply for the beautiful images of the natural world or, on a deeper level, as a search for universal truths made visible through the natural world. Each four-line poem paints a picture with depth and beauty, quietly conveying far more than a simple description of the creature." Susan McKnight, Candian Book Review Annual, 2004

"Energetic, wonderfully presented, and celebrating natural and animal life, these moving verses offer reflections to quietly ponder at leisure." - Wisconsin Bookwatch

“Governor-General's-Award winner E.D. Blodgett presents an excellent new volume, An Ark of Koans. Montreal illustrator Jacques Brault (a poet himself) accompanies the poems with a series of whimsical watercolours that recede as watermarks on the page (a curling fish, a slumping frog, and two insects are particularly notable). The book comprises a series of quatrains on animals, all admitted to the ark of a riddling mind, where they are preserved, one would like to think, from a flood of human indifference. This is by no means a book of environmental protest, but a poetry of identification, of imaginative engagement with the creaturely domain, the meditative word that incarnates and preserves....Blodgett's moving poems build a second ark of sorts, minute riddlings in a fallen rational world that bring love and wonderment to the cause.” University of Toronto Quarterly, Vo. 74, No. 1, Winter 2004/5