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April 09, 2014
Madness
Catching up on the frippery of “Downton Abbey,” I enjoyed Maggie Smith’s trenchant Dowager Countess of Grantham listening to her son wax a mite lyrically about land and history and then exclaiming ...
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April 08, 2014
Touch of Class
The other day, I agreed to read one of my own poems at a sixtieth wedding anniversary. There were fewer trees on the main street of the small town just north of Toronto than the last time I’d been there, ...
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April 07, 2014
Compression
In Stephanie Bolster’s “A Page from the Wonders of Life on Earth,” the writing is acutely compressed, each word standing in for what in another poet’s hands might take pages. There’s no room ...
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April 05, 2014
Fear of Flying
I gave a public performance the other night. It was supposed to be a reading from my recent novel, “The Outside World,” but I thought I’d sneak in a few poems from my “Invisible Dogs” as well. ...
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April 04, 2014
Fame
Patrick Friesen is a true lyric poet, open and honest, singing more often than talking. His poems are almost bodiless, his words slowly turning into rivers. In “Earth’s Crude Gravities,” language ...
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April 03, 2014
Voice
Maureen McLane’s book, “My Poets,” goes beyond poetics and criticism into a kind of channeling of the poets themselves: her versions of their work, her obsessions with their obsessions. She not ...
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April 02, 2014
Poetics of Place
I’ve been thinking about the poetics of place: Tim Lilburn’s Moosewood Sandhills; Don Domanski’s wilderness of a cosmos; Karen Solie’s truck stops and motels; Tim Bowling’s fishing boats. It’s ...
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April 01, 2014
Welcome to National Poetry Month
I always feel a bit uncomfortable when Poetry Month commences. It’s like I’ve had a secret for the last eleven months, no one really interested in how I’ve spent my days, successfully managing to ...
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September 10, 2014
On Silence
I grew up in a silent house, aside from the times when the silence was punctured with yelling. The crying was always quiet. The children did stay quiet—even when not crying—as best they could, to ...
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September 04, 2014
Resurrecting past Seasons
A note written for a Pedlar Press panel held last fall in St. John’s, NFLD, and in tardy response to a query from Robert Kroetsch:I have a crush on Robert Kroetsch. I’ve had this crush for a very ...