Recent Poetry

Obon: The Festival Of the Dead, Terry Watada

ISBN 1-897235-14-3; 978-1-897235-14-0; paper;
$15.95 CAD/$14.95 USD; 96 pages, trade; October 2006

Terry Watada crafts an artful mix of Buddhist tradition, Japanese-infused language and rich cultural history, where death is but one stop in the cyclical, timeless nature of a life. His is a warm tribute to the thin veil between worlds where sorrow is as transient as happiness. Obon: The Festival of the Dead is a celebration of people who endure through poverty and prejudice while they deftly and memorably evoke the traditions that redeem and define them. Deploying a remarkable balance between line and space, Watada’s span of syntax and diction are striking. Whether writing about drug addiction, forced labour, jazz, or the reveries of Japanese values, Watada measures the impact of each poem as carefully as a well-placed stone in the Ryoan-ji, or an arranged paper lantern in the Urabon. Obon: The Festival of the Dead is honest communion that bids ancestral voices to speak from every page, spreading their illumination long after the poetic moment, long after the season of Obon has ended.

Heidi Garnett’s Phosphorous is a poignant assertion of the ubiquitous nature of personal history.
Summoning the spirits and voices of those who suffered and endured the torments of Nazi Germany in World War II, Garnett relocates their moments of despair and suffering into poems of lament and reprieve. While family history simmers in the fragments of what is known and what isn’t, the unshakable knowledge of “skulls knitted together at the margins” informs the present. In all the rituals of immigration to Canada, and the journey west, and in the celebrations of acceptance, hard work and safety, the memories of the past are never far away. Through these biographical poems Garnett reminds us that though we “try to keep our distance” from the loss, pain and suffering of our histories, we cannot escape “the hooked branch that grafts the past/to now”.

“Based on the inheritance of a salt doll figurine from the poet's late great-great grandmother, these poems are leaps of the heart, palpitations of memory that attempt to reconcile the inheritances and the losses that flow through a bloodline of generations of women . . . ”
— Steven Ross Smith

Glen Sorestad has been publishing poetry for thirty years and throughout his distinguished career he has relied upon the central themes of family, history, nature and friendship to guide his readers through his ever-expanding desire to name, and remember. Blood & Bone, Ice & Stone continues Sorestad’s poetic journey. Whether seeking his family roots in Norway, capturing the small epiphanies in nature as he travels, or shaping the memories of those whom he has met and befriended, his poems deliver a supple wisdom and unfettered honesty.

“Sorestad honours the ordinary in his poetry . . . helps us see meaning in everyday rituals.”
— JM.Bridgman, Prairie Fire

Poems From A Broken Body leads the reader through poems engraved with heightened intellect and characterized by perceptions of pain. At times underscoring the sensitivity of genius and in counterpoint, the ignorance of the insensitive world, Clark’s work attempts to bring closure to an understanding of the “burden of self”. His poems are epitomized by spiritual energy and surreal imagery and are always carefully measured for line, breath and impact. This, his eighth book of poetry, is his most experimental.