Best of the Best Canadian Poetry Contributors
By 49thShelf
The Best of the Best Canadian Poetry in English
The Best of the Best Canadian Poetry in English takes the pulse of the last decade of Canadian poetry with ninety superb poems that have excelled—twice—at the test of “the best.” With poems chosen from the first nine volumes of this landmark Series, this special tenth-anniversary edition highlights a vibrant variety of Subjects from romance and family to ecology and the economy—not to mention blizzards and bears. Ranging from iconic poets Michael Ondaatje, Anne Carson, George Elliott C …
The Essential Margaret Avison
The Essential Margaret Avison showcases the development of one of Canada's most brilliant and original poets, twice winner of the Governor-General's Award for Poetry. Margaret Avison's vibrant life work is distilled here into a selection that is illuminating, generous and richly varied.
All Fools' Eve
From rooming-house to rooming-house
The toasted evening spells
City to hayrick, warming and bewildering
A million motes. From gilded tiers,
Balconies, and sombre rows,
Women see gopher-hawks, and rolling flaxen hills;
Smell a lost childhood's homely supper.
Men lean with folded newspapers,
Touched by a mushroom and root-cellar
Coolness. The wind flows,
Ruffles, unquickens. Crumbling ash
Leaves the west chill. The Sticks-&-Stones, this City,
Lies funeral bare.
Over its gaping arches stares
That haunt, the mirror mineral.
In cribs, or propped at plastic tablecloths,
Children are roundeyed, caught by a cold magic,
Fading of glory. In their dim
Cement-floored garden the zoo monkeys shiver.
Doors slam. Lights snap, restore
The night's right prose.
Gradually
All but the lovers' ghostly windows close.
On Malice
One of The Globe and Mail's Globe 100: Best Books of 2014
The fairground screamed. The mountains
and valley were gone. The fire was gone
too. The hanging ‘because’
was gone too. The men were away
and my heart already dead
and the fairground monkey dead in my mouth.
A spectre haunts a derelictNSA surveillance station on a hill in Berlin. Our posthumous selves cry to us from the Cloud. We’ve internalized the panopticon, but it still feels good to buy.
On Malice assembles evacuated forms, pol …
Book of Festus, The
The Book of Festus is a shattered fable. In these poems, every object has a voice; every thing is awake. Festus wakes inside a myth - on a wharf in Halifax, Nova Scotia - and recalls nothing but a bicycle. As he looks for it, he thinks the city's thoughts. Upon a sidewalk over a buried river, he remembers what the city remembers. He steps past a skateboard park to a Mi'kmaq lagoon. He follows 17th century pioneer cattle to a fast food restaurant. A girl he once knew steps out of the fragments. F …
Polari
"Polari," from the Italian "polare" ("to talk") is a coded language, originating in the U.K. and dating as far back as the 16th century. Overheard in outdoor markets, the theatre, fairgrounds, and circuses, it was appropriated by gay men to provide them with cover as well as with a way to assert personal and shared identities. It spread around the English-speaking world via the Royal Navy, the merchant marine, and cruise ships, adding and subverting many foreign-language words — like polari — …
As if a Raven
In these poems, Yvonne Blomer explores birds and their taming through language—the Blackbird as human soul, the Pelican as atonement, the Ostrich as cowardice, and the Raven as trickster, the nearest bird to God. She touches on mythology, biblical texts, and science to ask if poetry comes as close to damaging the wild things of the world as Audubon did in his collecting of birds to create the paintings. Mimesis, Plato argues, damages the soul, but Blomer asks: what does it do to the other crea …
Page from the Wonders of Life on Earth, A
An ambivalent zoo-tour, an open-eyed meander through a landscape of made and contained things.
A Page from The Wonders of Life on Earth is a book with a coherent vision of nature—constructed or framed, both in the present and in the recent past—through zoos, apiaries, formal gardens, menageries, and books like the Time-Life one named in the title. Informed by the author's grand tour of these zoos and gardens, these poems provide a strong lens for considering the many paradoxes of inter-spec …
Selected Poems
With Selected Poems, Tim Bowling has gathered together his finest poems over a twenty-year period, a selection including work from his widely celebrated debut collection, Low Water Slack, in 1995, to his tenth collection, Tenderman, in 2011. Always a poet of intense emotion and surprising metaphor whose lyric-narrative voice ranges in tone from romantic to humorous to coldly tragic and unrelievedly dark, Bowling's integrity has never wavered, nor has his commitment to celebrating poetic traditio …
