Slow Curve Out

Slow Curve Out, Maureen Scott Harris's new collection, gathers meditative poems of sensory engagement with both human and nonhuman worlds. The poet strives to see and hear the world clearly, trusting perception and experience before idea. Alert for resonances both among things and between inner and outer worlds, the poems ask us to adjust our sense of what it is to be human, to give up our (false) separation from the rest of the living world, and to recognize and celebrate our embeddedness in the web of relationships that constitutes life on Earth. Walking as well as looking and listening, the poems meander through a world that includes chickadees, crows, ravens, weather, rivers, valleys, dogs, traffic jams, prairie, deaths, births, weddings, mothers, fathers, daughters, languages, bones, dreams and more. Here beauty and pain coexist, and neither experience nor thought is fixed. How, the poems ask, does one keep one’s balance? Pay attention is their answer. Enacting a longing to be at home, both in the world and in the self, aware of the permeability of human consciousness, they say be here and notice the other presences—you’re not alone. Previous books and chapbooksWeathering: a group poem (a chapbook, with Ruth Roach Pierson, Sue Chenette, Patria Rivera, Julie Roorda). Silver Maple Press, 2008. (Republished online in Poemeleon, May 2010)The Raven and the Writing Desk (a chapbook, with Kelley Aitken). JackPine Press, 2007Drowning Lessons, Pedlar Press, Toronto, ON, 2004The World Speaks (a chapbook) Junction Books, Toronto, ON, 200A Possible Landscape, Brick Books, London, ON., Nov. 1993

"I’m interested in the way we are drawn to write about certain ideas or topics or people. In my experience poems often rise from the side, unexpectedly, like things glimpsed out of the corner of the eye. It feels like something that wants attention has presented itself to me. The most vivid example I have of this is “The Drowned Boy” sequence of poems in _Drowning Lessons_. In 1998 I was at the Sage Hill Fall Poetry Colloquium working on a manuscript I thought nearly finished. Tim Lilburn was the colloquium leader; he suggested that, as well as revising existing work, we undertake to write new poems, one every two or three days. One day I was wandering around the grounds of St. Peter’s, dizzy with October sunlight falling on yellow elms and pale gold stubble, when the image of a drowned boy floated into my mind. It unnerved me, and I didn’t want to write about it. But it/he would not go away. Thinking to be done with him I finally wrote “The Drowned Boy,” but that wasn’t the end. He insisted he had a life, and eventually, over the next several years, I ended up with a sequence of thirteen poems. But to get back to beginnings: . . . I don’t think my poems begin in any single way. They often are responses to events in my life or that impinge on me. I’ve been moved to write by other poems or by works of art, sometimes by an overheard phrase or even a headline. But the main source for me for many years has been nature. If I look at my books, _A Possible Landscape_ grew out of my attempt to discover whether or not I was a poet?—?I’d stopped writing for several years, feeling there was nothing in my life to write about. Then I discovered the poetry that was coming out of the women’s movement. I drew on fairy tales and nursery rhymes as well as details of domestic life, wanting to reclaim that material for poetry. _Drowning Lessons_ continued the work of reclamation, expanding it to include and celebrate the prairies where I grew up. It’s also preoccupied with grief and mourning as I tried to confront the losses that occur in a life." from Contemporary Verse 2, an excerpt of an interview between Harris and poet Jan Horner