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Poetry Canadian

Toward a Catalogue of Falling

by (author) Méira Cook

Publisher
Brick Books
Initial publish date
Oct 1996
Category
Canadian
  • eBook

    ISBN
    9781771310970
    Publish Date
    Sep 1996
    List Price
    $11.99
  • Paperback / softback

    ISBN
    9780919626881
    Publish Date
    Oct 1996
    List Price
    $12.95

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Description

Toward a Catalogue of Falling, Méira Cook's second full-length book, proves that the fall into language can be both graceful and startling. Whether she is rewriting Hans Christian Anderson's "The Little Mermaid" (as she does in her poem sequence "Days of Water"), thinking of Breughel's/Williams'/ Auden's Icarus, reading oranges, or offering advice for catching crows, Cook's words are luminous. Language is a character in these poems, along with circus performers, Venetian tour guides, clumsy sons and migrating geese. Cook writes poems that bless hearts turned to salt, and revive the silenced energies of words. Always unexpected, always elegant, this is language that endures.

"The poems are dramatic rushes of words, vibrant and intense.... Some are bizarre narratives fusing the wild 'slanguage' of Eliza Clark and Ondaatje-like exotica." for A Fine Grammar of Bones -- George Elliott Clarke

About the author

Méira Cook is the award-winning author of the novels The House on Sugarbush Road, which won the McNally Robinson Book of the Year Award, and Nightwatching, which won the Margaret Laurence Award for Fiction. She has also published five poetry collections, most recently Monologue Dogs, which was shortlisted for the 2016 Lansdowne Prize for Poetry and for the 2016 McNally Robinson Book of the Year Award. She won the CBC Poetry Prize in 2007 and the inaugural Walrus Poetry Prize in 2012. In 2011 she served as Writer in Residence at the University of Manitoba’s Centre for Creative Writing and Oral Culture, and was the 2013–14 Writer in Residence at the Winnipeg Public Library. Born and raised in Johannesburg, South Africa, she now lives in Winnipeg.

Méira Cook's profile page

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