Description
Winner of the Fred Cogswell Award for Excellence in Poetry
They were shot, transported, deported. They were hanged, or they hanged themselves. They starved, or their hearts suddenly failed, or drugs or cancer consumed them. Others lived into their nineties, one even to 103. Nicola Vulpe's Insult to the Brain transports us from the gas-seeped muck of the Somme, to a tiny apartment in Buenos Aires, to an undisclosed prison yard in Iran, and a hundred times and places in between, to join some of the last century's finest poets in their final moments: horrific, tragic, ordinary, silly, absurd. Whether it is with the minimalist Gare de Rouen, 1916, dedicated to Émile Verhaeren, who was accidently dropped under a train by an adoring crowd, the lament The Poet Descends, Willing the Stairs, for Forough Farrokhzad, who swerved her car into a wall to avoid a school bus, or the openly political Death and His Kin, for Tal Almallouhi, who disappeared into a Syrian prison and may or may not be dead, Vulpe writes unblinkingly with clarity, kindness--even humour-- of our common fate, and brings us closer to the fragile core of our humanity.
About the author
Nicola Vulpe considers poetry an unfortunate habit, but has nonetheless published three collections of poetry, When the Mongols Return, Insult to the Brain and Blue Tile, a novella, The Extraordinary Event of Pia H., an anthology of Canadian poetry about the Spanish Civil War, and essays on subjects as diverse as the Epic of Gilgamesh, and the afterlife of Norman Bethune.
Awards
- Winner, Fred Cogswell Award for Excellence in Poetry
Excerpt: Insult to the Brain (by (author) Nicola Vulpe)
The Poet Bids Adieu to His Poems You are, as we know, turtles.The male has his moment,and is indifferent.The female fusses about in the sand,and is gone.The hatchlings are fully formed,no metamorphosis, no second chance.For the crippled and the unlucky,under the shrieking gulls,the sea is an infinity.from Upside DownStrange times, my dear,the executioner's walked off the job.The judge commuted the sentence to whatever the prisoner chooses,which is - can you believe it? a marriage proposal to the prosecutor,promptly accepted.In distant Madagascar a dodo rose from the sand and sang,though so far as we know these birds never sang before.At home the news briefs were equally distressing,the generals in their big hats and uniforms, and the CEOs in theirsconcluded a suicide pact - after breakfast, of course.The cleaners found the note in the afternoon.Such regrets, it reads, such regrets. The Queen and her minister, oldand accustomed to hedging, preferred exile.The ship sailed off at midnight, a sickle-blade moonunhooked from the cranes on the docks and followed her out.The Wall Street boys checked themselves in to the loony bin,they're out there on the lawn now,rolling joints and giggling at the cloudsand the coloured bits they pulled from their phones ...
Editorial Reviews
Vulpe walks where no one has walked before-- and to stunning effect.
Laurence Eldredge; The Oxford Magazine, Michaelmas Term, 2019
This collection is a unique ode to poets, their lives, and poetry itself.
Arc Poetry Magazine
