POETRY

Available in the US
World Rights Available

ISBN 978-1-897235-59-1; paper;
$15.95 CAD; 80 pages , trade paper; March 2009

In his sixth poetry collection, John Livingstone Clark creates a series of meditations on, and poetic responses to the work of Anne Szumigalski: specifically the title poem from her debut collection Woman Reading in Bath, which is a radical, though humorous, deconstruction of all patriarchal theologies. Clark’s inspiration for this project was a question posed by the elder poet several times in her last few years: “Why do so many of my book titles have water in them?” For Clark, the poem “Woman Reading in Bath” reflects a number of major themes in her work, and by writing individual poems in relation to single lines (occasionally a couplet), the ‘mythopoesis” of her work could be opened up in a book of poetry.

Within this textual framework, Clark’s poems are dominated by the metaphor of a swimmer enveloped in a series of states and environments. From the personal to the universal, this collection is an ode to the harmonics of mind, body, and spirit. Why always about water? Characters and Selves within beg to know, and the swimmer reciprocates: the body is sixty-five percent water; the water breaks at birth; and in the unconscious process of Individuation, we are “drowning to life”.