With Here, award-winning poet Colin Browne offers a book of luminous encounters, contradictions, collisions, and meditations on art, nature, justice, historical memory, and territorial occupation. Browne’s texts mine the harrowing destinies and densities of place – in this case, of the North American Northwest Coast. The work’s seven movements are tuned to the autobiographical, alert to rhythm and improvisation, and immersed in an ambience of memory and tenderness.

Here is a book for the ear, its compositional model borrowed from jazz improvisation; by locating a rhythm or a melodic line, and opening the field to associations, visions, rhymes, chance, interruption, and grace, the texts summon and assemble themselves. "Art does not render the visible, but renders visible," said Paul Klee. Why are we aching so? Where are the words and melodies that will heal us?

Here is also a book of voices, infused with the eros of intertextuality: Apollinaire, whose spirit presides over these pages, along with Antonin Artaud, André Breton, Robert Burton, Louis Clexlixqen, Henry Edenshaw, Frantz Fanon, Sa7plek (Chief Joe Capilano), Gwendolyn MacEwen, Charles Olson, Pablo Picasso, Dorothy Jean Ray, Raymond Roussel, Gertrude Stein, Henry David Thoreau, and Walt Whitman. Included are Browne’s translations of early modernist poems by Apollinaire and Cendrars citing Vancouver, which in the early decades of the twentieth century captured the imagination of Parisian artists and poets.

Colin Browne’s most recent book of poetry, Here, was published by Talonbooks in September 2020. His extended essay, Entering Time: The Fungus Man Platters of Charles Edenshaw (Talonbooks, 2016), is a poetic exploration of three argillite platters made by Haida artist Da.a xiigang (Charles Edenshaw) between 1885 and 1895. In 2018, Browne and composer Alfredo Santa Ana collaborated on the creation of Music for a Night in May, three new works for string quartet, soprano, and spoken voice, presented at the Vancouver East Cultural Centre. He was the guest curator in 2016 for the Vancouver Art Gallery exhibition I had an interesting French Artist to see me this summer: Emily Carr and Wolfgang Paalen in British Columbia, a show that featured the largest number of Paalen’s paintings ever exhibited in Canada. He has recently written catalogue essays for exhibitions in New York and Vienna that reflect on the history and legacy of the Surrealist engagement with the ceremonial and monumental arts of the Northwest Coast. Browne is currently working on a book about Wolfgang Paalen’s 1939 journey from Alaska to Victoria, tentatively entitled Wolfgang Paalen’s Northwest Passage.

Colin Browne's profile page

“A stunning and serious collection."
—rob mclennan

“There is no 'here' without an understanding of how we got here and Browne takes the gull’s-eye view of history ceding, receding, proceeding as he defines optimism step by step, calling on his examination of the past to imagine the future.”
—Ormsby Review

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