• Age: 16
• Grade: 11

Repose, the striking new work by award-winning poet Adam Getty, is technically flawless, philosophically refreshing and naturally phrased.

Repose is an exploration of the definition of cultural freedom; it is a pointed look at an obsession with production, and a comparison of the natural and urban environments that shape our lives. Getty argues that our lives are so tightly controlled by non-negotiable experiences of employment that for the majority of people, employment is anything but a democratic process.

Getty's attempt to find spontaneity and a modern idiom by writing in traditional poetic styles mirrors a cultural attempt to find freedom and vitality. By meticulously studying the poetic techniques of the past, Adam Getty has put new wine into old wineskins: he has found a voice that is erudite, disciplined and, ultimately, free.

Adam Getty was born in Toronto and currently lives in Hamilton, Ontario. He has had his poetry published in journals in both the USA and Canada. His first full length book, Reconciliation, won the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award for best first book of poetry and was shortlisted for the 2003 Trillium Award. Repose was cited as one of the "best volumes of verse in 2008" by the Winnipeg Free Press.

Adam Getty's profile page

And Adam Getty's excellent book Repose, while similarly capturing elements of human construction and the hard work of physical labour, questions such sentiments. While there is a poetics to labour in these poems, there is also a great deal of agitation against mismanagement, against exploitation gone rife. The title poem reveals a speaker who is:

a red-breasted robin that's never/ left the latticework of limbs and leaves/ for the deepening sky and now is severed/ by consuming fire and a thick corrupting sleeve/ of bitter smoke, smoked out as though a beetle/ had emerged from dark wood thrown on a rising fire.

Getty's well-composed book examines the conditions of labour, of the human interaction with the world, and finds in them a world that is poetic, yet sorely lacking the self-awareness that would give it a strong sense of equity, of ecology, and of justice.
―The Dalhousie Review

[Getty's poems] juxtapose the mythic and quotidian so as to forge a practical spirituality that bears witness equally to the prophet and the prostitute.
-Emily Carr, Canadian Literature

[a] brilliant mixture of technical control and social protest
―Maurice Mireau, Winnipeg Free Press

Getty's poems are as deeply lodged in his literary and scholarly syllabus as they are entrenched in the industrial stench of Hamilton, with its wreckages, steel mills and slaughterhouses ... [his] deployment of traditional forms, prophetic rhetoric and classical allusions would appear to go hand in hand with his resistance to the desecrations of modernity, his desire to return to, or at least to retain the illusion of, a more gracious era.
―Catherine Owen, Canadian Notes & Queries

Getty has created a collection of highly intelligent, deeply felt, and ... beautifully written poems.
--Adrian Fowler, Journal of Canadian Poetry

Repose

With a careful and conscious attention to form, Getty explores in this poetry book the endurance required to live in and make a living in modern times. Using the contrasts between urban and natural environments and their incongruous meeting points, the reader is pulled along in the process of the poet’s hard-won understandings and efforts to make sense of his world. With subjects as diverse as a hog slaughterhouse, steel town, west coast rural sub-division, and an encounter with a dying suicide, the poems fulfill the promise of the opening quote from Kierkegaard that, “it isn’t through form one receives life but through life (one) receives form”.

Getty is the author of Reconciliation,and his work has been included in the anthology Breathing Fire 2: Canada’s New Poets. He received the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award was shortlisted for the Trillium Poetry Award.