This Here Paradise
- Publisher
- Anvil Press
- Initial publish date
- Sep 2022
- Category
- Canadian, NON-CLASSIFIABLE
-
Paperback / softback
- ISBN
- 9781772141931
- Publish Date
- Sep 2022
- List Price
- $18
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Description
This Here Paradise begins with an epigraph from the work of Welsh poet, Menna Elfyn: "your language a hymn/ lost in the multitude,/ requiem for a world/ that's forgetting how to be". As if in response to this "forgetting," Wharton's poems move from the personal to cross a panorama of hopeful attentiveness. Clear images combine with a distinctive sense of rhythm and music to shape a collection both straight-ahead readable and carefully thoughtful, serious and playful. There is a recognition that paradise includes both highs and lows. The presumptive duality of these two conditions suggests a tension that resolves through the book's five sections, as Wharton opens a suitcase of birds and watches them soar over a landscape alive with radiant, open waters.
About the author
Calvin Wharton is the chair of Creative Writing at Douglas College in New Westminster, BC, and edited Event from 1996–2001. He co-edited the poetry anthology East of Main with Tom Wayman, and has published a chapbook of poems, Visualized Chemistry; the non*#45;fiction Rowing, with Silken Laumann; abnd a collection of short stories, The songs by Hank Williams. Aside from teaching, he has managed a variety of jobs: sand-blaster, gardener, sawmill worker, and ranch hand, among others.