A Ragged Pen
A Ragged Pen brings to the page five essays on memory. First delivered in Vancouver in the spring of 2005, these talks — by Robert Finley, Patrick Friesen, Aislinn Hunter, Anne Simpson and Jan Zwicky — examine the narrative challenges, lyric energy and questions of verity that surround the subject of memory in a creative context.
Finley’s essa …
Book of Frog, The
What Frog is saying about the Book of Frog:The Book of Frog is probably the best book ever written, right up there with The Divine Comedy and Gilgamesh. Except it's short and in English! A cinch, huh? You will like it. In addition to being action-packed and by me, it has some great pictures (also of me). And it has some excellent emails from my fri …
Forge
This new collection from Jan Zwicky is a set of variations that employs a restricted, echoic vocabulary to explore themes of spiritual catastrophe, transformation and erotic love. Zwicky is a philosopher, musician and award-winning poet who lives on Quadra Island, British Columbia. Her most recent collection of poetry is Thirty-seven Small Songs & …
Hydrologos
Hydrologos is one long poem composed in five suites and a coda, and spoken through masks. It is a poem about a specific passion, the one that always follows love: sorrow. At the poem’s centre is the original lyric elegy, the myth of Orpheus, but re-imagined from the perspective of Eurydike. What happens to a human being under the geologic pressur …
Plato as Artist
“The purpose of this essay,” writes Jan Zwicky in her introduction, “is not to adumbrate a new theory about Plato, nor to develop a new approach. Plato is old; he is famous; my Greek is sketchy — there is nothing revelatory I am competent to say. And yet I wish to say something; in particular, I wish to say something about his dialogue Meno …
Robinson’s Crossing
My great- grandmother slept in a boxcar on the night before she made the crossing. The steel ended in Sangudo then, there was no trestle on the Pembina, no siding on the other side. They crossed by ferry, and went on by cart through bush, the same eight miles. Anothe rfamily legend has it that she stood there in the open doorway of the shack and sa …
Songs For Relinquishing the Earth
Songs for Relinquishing the Earth contains many poems of praise and grief for the imperilled earth drawing frequently on Jan Zwicky's experience as a musician and philosopher and on the landscapes of the prairies and rural Ontario.
Songs for Relinquishing the Earth was first published by the author in 1996 as a hand-made book, each copy individually …
Thinking and Singing
Investigations into the role and importance of poetry in the culture of the mind and consciousness by some of our foremost practitioners of the art. Tim Lilburn and his interlocutors have been carrying on their "five-pointed conversation" about the relationship between poetry and philosophy for over a decade. The results of the moveable discussion …
Thirty-seven Small Songs & Thirteen Silences
For the past several years, Jan Zwicky has been developing a definition and working examples of the word “lyric.” Her writing has taken the shape of poetry and philosophy, neither necessarily confined to the traditions of those genres. Thirty-seven Small Songs & Thirteen Silences is the latest in this ongoing focus, previously explored in colle …
Why I Sing the Blues
A magnificent anthology of blues poems/songs by some of Canada's best poets; on the accompanying CD, the poems are masterfully interpreted by Canadian west coast blues artists.
Writing contributors include Ken Babstock, bill bissett, George Elliott Clarke, Lynn Coady, Lorna Crozier, Barry Dempster, Patrick Friesen, Mark Jarman, Ryan Knighton, Robe …
Wisdom & Metaphor
A hardcover new-edition reprint of Zwicky’s GG-nominated book on the importance of metaphor to understanding.
In the foreword to Wisdom & Metaphor, Jan Zwicky describes how “those who think metaphorically are enabled to think truly, because the shape of their thinking echoes the shape of the world.” Wisdom & Metaphor is a different kind of boo …
Wittgenstein Elegies
Complex, intricately textured and polyphonic, this sequence of five long poems enacts the fulfilment of poetry and philosophy in one another. "In Schiller's terms, it is the elegiac longing for unity of soul and world, here expressed in some of the most beautiful poetry of 1986." -- Ronald B. Hatch, University of Toronto Quarterly
