• Age: 15
• Grade: 10

The poems in A Dark Boat shake hands with darkness; the kind of darkness that is rich and necessary for a full human life, the darkness of soil into which seeds drop and grow, the darkness of the grave into which the body is lowered.

Heavily inspired by cante jondo (Spanish "deep song") and Portuguese fado, these poems explore the kind of yearning that is contained in the Portuguese word saudad: a longing for something in the past that can never be found because time has shifted everything away from what it was.

Praise for A Dark Boat:

BC Poetry in Transit selection (poem from the book displayed on Vancouver city buses)

"I don't know how Patrick Friesen has found his way into these poems: they seem to spring from the beginning of time. Nothing is held back. The poems - beautiful to read - are as devastatingly real in their drama on an immense stage of sun and shadow, as living bone. The literary haunting is Lorca and the memories are of the stranger, the stray dog, the witness to the wedding on the banks of the river of death. I read these poems with the utter conviction that Friesen had crossed barriers of time, place, and culture to draw forth poems out of the heart of mystery." (Marilyn Bowering)

"... If you've never heard fado music, you should. It is an intense, raw, emotional music ... Or you could just read this book, which is imbued with his reminiscences of his trip and the music of fado. ... lines that punch you in the gut, leaving you breathless. ... " (Prairie Fire)

"[Friesen's] poems ... are both evocative and compelling in their exploration of how loss can connect us across cultural boundaries, yet also make visible the limits of that connectedness." (Canadian Literature)

Patrick Friesen is the author of Blasphemer's Wheel, winner of the Manitoba Book of the Year Award and runner-up for the Milton Acorn People's Poetry Award. A Broken Bowl was short-listed for the Governor General's Award. His most recent work st. mary at main was shortlisted for the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize. He has also written for stage, radio, TV and film. He lives in Vancouver where he teaches writing.

Patrick Friesen's newest collection Carrying the Shadow is a haunting ode to the lives we have felt too briefly, known only in passing and yearn to hold still. While those who loved them keen softly between his lines, Friesen invokes their loss as one remembers a cool breath on the back of the neck, a faint shadow on a headstone, a watermark on the bedstand. With wisdom and beauty and invention, Friesen walks us through the graveyard of human kind where a symphony of voices still conduct the lives left behind long after they depart flesh for spirit. Intermingling prose poems and traditional free verse, Friesen both narrates and sings the stories of absence and forgetting, tales of lingering memory and fleeting love. With infinite candor and sensitivity, Friesen celebrates the lives of idols and iconoclasts, wives and widows, farmers and freeloaders. For anyone who has urged another title in the canon of Friesen's award-winning work, here is a collection worthy of accolade. Death has no dominion, but poetry has dominion over all.

Patrick Friesen's profile page

A Dark Boat

The poet revisits a specific time (the Spanish Civil war in the time of the execution of the poet Lorca) and place (contemporary Spain) and uses language to recreate the somber tone and discordant images of a Spain of beauty and brutality. The poems are instructive explorations and demonstrations of the effective uses of form for young writers through the use of lineation and enjambment, almost no punctuation or capitals, and diction.

The poems also demonstrate the value of reading aloud and how it enhances understanding and the sorrowful mood of the poems. Includes a glossary of Spanish and Portuguese terms.

a dark boat was shortlisted for the Governor General’s Literary Award and won the BC Book Prizes, Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize and the P.K. Page Founder’s Award.

Caution: Includes some explicit sexual language.