Alterations
- Publisher
- Signature Editions
- Initial publish date
- Oct 2004
- Category
- Canadian
-
Paperback / softback
- ISBN
- 9780921833970
- Publish Date
- Oct 2004
- List Price
- $14.95
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Description
Alterations is a book of arrival at beginnings. When George Payerle finally escaped city life, he returned to the coast into which he had been born when Vancouver was a much smaller town — a coast where the mountains fall into the sea as waves of rainforest. This is a coast of "shadow weather" amongst cedars and fir where the light of everyday is a Turner painting, a land/seascape suffused with the spirit made visible.
In these poems the old coast of logging and fishing is all but extinct, inhabited by ghosts of men with peaveys in their hands and bulldozers in their eyes. Ghosts with the power to inform us, like the rusted logskidder’s arch standing by the highway as though it were a dinosaur’s hipbones.
These Alterations continue the musical meditations of Payerle’s Last Trip to Oregon, which memorialized the death of his friend, the poet Charles Lillard. The music has moved towards Bach’s cello suites and Jan Garbarek’s loon-like saxophone. The serenity achieved through mourning the death of a friend has moved into transcendent contemplation of the diurnal and the extraordinary — garbage day, George W’s baleful face, Vancouver Island rising like a tsunami in the west, the return of a prodigal daughter — transcendent but never without pain, or death — language many-jewelled as the fangs of "these wolves herding prey toward consummation, and tender yet as ewes with lamb."
About the author
George Payerle, of Hungarian extraction, is a novelist, poet, translator and editor. His two published novels are the afterpeople (Anansi, 1970) and Unknown Soldier (Macmillan, 1987). Short fictions, parts of novels and poetry have appeared widely in periodicals over the past three decades and on radio. In recent years, Payerle has returned to writing poetry, some of which has appeared in magazine and chapbook form. The Last Trip to Oregon is his first book of poems. A longtime resident of Vancouver, Payerle now makes his home in Roberts Creek, BC.
Excerpt: Alterations (by (author) George Payerle)
"An Anabasis"
Devil's club and salal?pour down the deadfall-tangled valleys?and lead us, lost, thrashing & spine-pricked?to the sea,?thalassa thalassa?where no Coaster can be lost?any more than the Greeks?wise Xenophon led and followed?home. ?"Coasting"??They came in grace,?angels of the paradigm'strolling madrona beaches of Davis Bay'soft steel unto the blue bones?Of the Island.?This place gives god -?grace of cedar, fir, salal and weeds?antiparadigm anaparadigm-?a thought containing our absence?into which we make incursion?like Israeli armour into dust of Palestine.?It is among the rocks we have placed our mattresses,?slept with swordfern?and pale copper-green skin of madrona;?Joni Mitchell lives here?yet we are paving paradise.
We become accustomed to'serenity?Roberts Creek Wilson Creek Sechelt?Gibsons?accustomed to our rural polity?until three kids in baseball caps?and a broken-down logger wearing shades'seem cool and cynical?as the civic millions.?Daft and hopeless as rain,?the coho flashing silver sunbursts?to leaven with light?the graceful waters of Davis Bay.
"Eoxatos"
It explodes?like a jump horse going over an eight-foot wall?and it's only a day.?The horse hangs in the sky, eternal?instant of the godforce stamped into eyeblue sky?and into the brain-?four-hooved flight beyond the impossible,?phar lap, which means lightning?and was the name of a horse?murdered for beating the best?America had to offer.?And it's only a day. By midafternoon,?so still at 30° in the shade nothing seems to move,?not even the strip-loin bands of cirrus in the sky,?not even the children running in the shade of the trees.?And not the jump horse?that will never come down.
"Erotic Achronometric"
The night time, the sweet time,?the neither waking nor sleeping time,?the slow erogeny?at any time of day,?real as bricks and bones,?different utterly from the day time, "real time,"?think and do and act time,?this erodreamtime?pretending only to be all time,?this time?every time.
"From Gower Point to Irvines Landing"
The men with bulldozers in their eyes?have mostly gone on pogey now, or into rest homes?or the grave?Mad Frenchy ran?the Gulf Oil in Madeira Park,?Maudzi Anglais! to any customer who looked sideways?at anything
?or got in his cuestick's way on the plywood floors up?the Rigger's Roost looking over Garden Bay;?fell in love vvith him, or him with me?across the butt-end of that pool cue one hot day?thirty-two summers ago, when everyone figured me?for a cityslick Summer boy with his hippychick,?and I smiled into Frenchy's deadly sea-blue eyes and?we ended up drinking Blue out of bottles down in the?bent-chrome midden he called home out back the Gulf? Tombstones in his eyes And after that?he'd phone and say "Where ya been, white boy?"?and we'd pound down unmixed boilermakers sweating in the sun?while he tried to egg me into fistfights?over T.S. Eliot vs Jules LaForgue or which end is up?when you've been down so long End up in rassling matches?in the dust, him small and strong as a terrier's jaws, me long and sneaky,?lying flat on our backs drunk as skunks staring at the cerulean sky,?"The underbelly of God, white boy, the underbelly of God"?Gone, somewhere,?with all his less agreeable friends and foes?who ruled this coast with chainsaws and peavies and?fists quicker'n sledgehammers?We miss them God knows we miss them,?though there never was a damn thing you could do,?except beer for beer, shot for shot, a poem for a punch?in the head
?Glad the old Pen Hotel's gone, where the only?way not to eat a pool cue was feed one to the other guy?first, or run No good, the Pen But I miss '?old Gilles Lalonde and the Rigger's plywood floor gone?cutesy Hallmark pink and mauve,?those lean and hungry scruff-faced bastards?who decided I wasn't what I seemed, though I was,?once Frenchy took me under his steel-belted wing?The way I think sometimes?the lonely forests miss?those guys come humping block and tackle up the sidehill?to clearcut the mothers down?Thirty years ago and more,? already this Coast was dying,?though no one would've been left standing?had it lived on And I'm still waiting on a postcard?from Frenchy to say the beer's fine and the women finer?here where the dead poets dance?on the other side of the hill
Editorial Reviews
“It is a fine act of literary juggling to write poetry that speaks with a voice of worldly experience but still manages to keep hold of those sensations of awe and wonder that spark the imagination. In Alterations, a book filled with poems as canny as they are uncanny, George Payerle keeps those torches, and many others, delightfully spinning in the air.”
—Paul Vermeersch
