Tides at the Edge of the Senses
- Publisher
- Libros Libertad
- Initial publish date
- Nov 2007
- Category
- Canadian
-
Paperback / softback
- ISBN
- 9780978186562
- Publish Date
- Nov 2007
- List Price
- $12.95
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Description
This work explores the elemental power (and menace) of the West Coast sea-faring experience with an ice-cool sensory awareness and a heightened alertness to the richness (and treachery) of language. At one level many of the poems are elegies to a disappearing way of life – and to lost lives, caught in sharply focused vignettes. Yet the texts also become existential meditations – often sparse, frequently enigmatic – about identity and memory, a voyage into psychic depths.
About the author
John Skapski was born in London, England, in the middle of the Second World War, to Polish and English descent. After the war, his family moved to a small town in Paraguay, where there were no roads, water, or electricity. After immigration to Vancouver, Canada, Skapski got involved in the local fishing industry and studied at UBC, where he, influenced by J. Michael Yates, switched over from Engingeering to Honours English. After completing his Masters degree in Creative Writing, Skapski started gillnetting on his own in the Steveston area, and continued to do so throughout his law studies at UBC. As a practicing lawyer, he gradually diminished his fishing duties to stay home with his family. Now, he still lives in Steveston and enjoys writing and playing ice hockey with his son.
Excerpt: Tides at the Edge of the Senses (by (author) John Skapski)
Coastline Blues: Two
Visions of the hustle that was Dance among the black and leaning pilings Like children playing in a cemetery: splash Against shore, waterlogged cedar, and a memory I continually fabricate, of packers Always unloading salmon Into a whirlpool of people and machines. Wharves, heavy with barnacles and time, Teredoed through and through the days and nights, Waterlog in the silences between Shake cabins sinking under moss at waterside And crumbling skeletons of half remembered boats On this or that sandy shore or rock bound cove: Where, now and again, my wake washes through And I invent men, motives, and machinery Until those waves subside And all that's past again lies calm. All these relics. Rusting. Welds unbeading. History hanging loose on failing rivets, hulls flaking
In the intertidal: masts nudging surface at lower tides Like stray memories long after a finished affair. Picking through the detritus beyond These various storm tide lines Hunters of glass floats and other mementos Work their way around another object It's own tombstone, nothing more chiseled upon Than what the sea deigns: only Sand, lichen, and imagination To state that once it was.
Editorial Reviews
John Skapski has one of the best balanced minds I have ever encountered... he is the indisputable king of fish and fishing metaphor on the west coast of Canada.
J. Michael Yates
