Tablature
- Publisher
- McGill-Queen's University Press
- Initial publish date
- Jan 2015
- Category
- Canadian
-
eBook
- ISBN
- 9780773581951
- Publish Date
- Jan 2015
- List Price
- $16.95
-
Paperback / softback
- ISBN
- 9780773544536
- Publish Date
- Jan 2015
- List Price
- $19.95
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Description
From the "rubble [that] is the order of the day" in the opening poem to the longing for a "radiant happy ending" in the book's final line, Tablature is a book of poems that traverses a great swath of the heart's experience in compelling and lucid poetic language.
Bruce Whiteman's first book of poems in traditional lined form in thirty years is by turns learned and allusive, and emotionally expressive and despairing. These poems engage three large and powerful subjects: the landscapes we see and abide in, music that is comforting and a guide to hearing the poem's compulsions, and love - erotic, domestic, and enduring. Whiteman is keenly observant of the natural world of birds and trees, of rocks and water, alive to the pressures and hurts of daily life, and above all to the ways in which music rescues us from dependency and pulls us back from a "cultivated hysteria." If there is an "intimate / apocalypse," there is also "radiant hope."
The poems in Tablature capture readers with their singular music and their bright and unblinking takes on the quotidian challenges of living a life. These are poems of a highly tuned sensibility matched by a sweetness of language.
About the author
Bruce Whiteman is a Canadian poet and writer living in Los Angeles. He is the author of many books of poetry, including Visible Stars: New and Selected Poems (1995), Tristia, and XXIV Love Poems (2002). He regularly writes reviews for Canadian and American journals, and his scholarly books include Lasting Impressions: A Short History of English Publishing in Quebec (1994) and J.E.H. Macdonald (1995).
Other titles by
Work to Be Done
Selected Essays and Reviews
Best Canadian Essays 2021
The Sad Mechanic Exercise
Intimate Letters
The Invisible World Is in Decline, Book VII
The Invisible World Is in Decline
Poems
Visible Stars
New and Selected Poems
Lasting Impressions
A Short History of English Publishing in Quebec
Full Sun
Selected Poems of Ken Norris
The Letter of John Sutherland, 1942-1956
