Description
An Ark of Koans is a meditation on the mystery of what happens at the moment it happens. Although it takes animals as its threshold, animals only serve as innocent guides toward fathoming, if not understanding, events as small, inconceivable miracles.
About the authors
Poet and scholar, E.D. Blodgett has published seventeen books of poetry two of which were awarded the Governor General’s Award. He is an Emeritus Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Alberta. His research has varied from mediaeval European romance to Canadian Comparative Literature and his publications include Five-Part Invention: A History of Literary History in Canada (2003) and Elegy (2005).
Harold Coward is Professor Emeritus and the past director of the Centre for Studies in Religion and Society at the University of Victoria where he continues to be involved as a research fellow.
Poet, dramatist, essayist, editor and novelist (winner of the 1984 Governor General's award for his novel, Agonie) Jacques Brault was born in Montreal in 1933. He worked on the docks as a labourer to pay for his studies; these led him to philosophy and literature. His work has been translated into several languages and he has received awards including the "Prix Québec-Paris" in 1968, the "Prix Duvernay" in 1978, the "Prix Athanase-David" in 1986. He has received Canada's highest literary honor, the Governor General's Award, three times. The first time was in 1970 for his piece of theatre Quand nous serons heureux and the second was for his novel Agonie in 1985. In 1999, his collaboration with E.D. Blodgett (Transfiguration) earned him a third Governor General's Award.
Awards
- The Alcuin Society Citations for Excellence in Book Design in Canada - 3rd, Poetry
- AAUP Book, Jacket & Journal Show - Jackets & Covers
- Alberta Book Publishing Awards - Book Cover Design of the Year
- Alberta Book Publishing Awards - Book Design of the Year
- Word Guild Writing Awards - Finalist, Books - Special
- Alberta Book Publishing Awards - Trade Fiction Book of the Year
Editorial Reviews
"The poems in An Ark of Koans can be read simply for the beautiful images of the natural world or, on a deeper level, as a search for universal truths made visible through the natural world. Each four-line poem paints a picture with depth and beauty, quietly conveying far more than a simple description of the creature." Susan McKnight, Candian Book Review Annual, 2004
" The thematic furniture is outsize-but they are handled so lightly and dreamily that the poems seem like so many snow-globes with their two or three primary elements falling in a soft flurry of words..These paragraphs offer a master-class on the use of repetition, or in other words, on how to walk elegantly in long dress without having to gather up the train of your own utterances and without once tripping. As the last line tells it, these poems turn continually upon themselves, which is what makes them mesmerizing." Jeffery Davidson, Volume 75, Number 1, Winter 2006.
"Governor-General's-Award winner E.D. Blodgett presents an excellent new volume, An Ark of Koans. Montreal illustrator Jacques Brault (a poet himself) accompanies the poems with a series of whimsical watercolours that recede as watermarks on the page (a curling fish, a slumping frog, and two insects are particularly notable). The book comprises a series of quatrains on animals, all admitted to the ark of a riddling mind, where they are preserved, one would like to think, from a flood of human indifference. This is by no means a book of environmental protest, but a poetry of identification, of imaginative engagement with the creaturely domain, the meditative word that incarnates and preserves....Blodgett's moving poems build a second ark of sorts, minute riddlings in a fallen rational world that bring love and wonderment to the cause." University of Toronto Quarterly, Vo. 74, No. 1, Winter 2004/5
"Energetic, wonderfully presented, and celebrating natural and animal life, these moving verses offer reflections to quietly ponder at leisure." - Wisconsin Bookwatch
"These tiny quatrains are compressed meditations that expand in the mind to reveal glimpse after glimpse of a cosmic vision in which what happens in the world of animals resonates in the human world and in the realm of the divine. They have a kinship with cultural paradigms that reach back to a time before written language. Like the poems of Emily Dickinson and the songs of William Blake, their surprising energy is not the result of simple aggregation, but resides in and releases from the fact that the whole of Blodgett's poetic universe is present in each of its parts." George Amabile
"E.D. Blodgett's An Ark of Koans is a series of deeply meditative, zoological-themed quatrains by a typically sublime Edmonton-based, Governor General's Award-winning poet. The perfect chunks of verse in this book are almost holographic in nature, each snippet embodying its own complete poetic universe, plumbing philosophical depths without ever losing sight of everyday vernacular comfort....You can't ask for better bedside reading." Gilbert A. Bouchard, The Edmonton Journal
