Nicholas Papaxanthos on Dean Young
Dean Young’s Word Triplets We could say that there is a narrative to these three words: brick, blood-drop, red feather, which entails the passage from inert material to mortal flesh to a sort of avian/angelic possibility, or we could say that what holds those things together is their redness. I try to be alert to...
Michael Redhill on Margaret Avison
TWO POEMS BY MARGARET AVISON APRIL Dark like a handful of cool gray silk. Clocks strike the hour. Out in the clear-gleaming sky a robin's song, silence unravelling. The trees with tremulous-aching fingers shaping the quiet airflow. Sick-faint dark limp in the arms of the infinite. CROWD CORALLING Hard rain. the bean-mash smell. leaky tin-brim...
Lisa Robertson on John Clare
Emmonsail's Heath in Winter BY JOHN CLARE I love to see the old heath's withered brake Mingle its crimpled leaves with furze and ling, While the old heron from the lonely lake Starts slow and flaps his melancholy wing, And oddling crow in idle motions swing On the half rotten ashtree's topmost twig, Beside whose...
Lisa Robertson on Denise Riley
Here is a clear fragment broken off from the perennial drama of girlhood, the vastness and vibration of summer air all around it. The waves sound their regular metre through the lines. The girls are the girls who walk with suppleness and wit through Sappho's fragments, through Ovid's changes, at once mythically impersonal and lapidary,...
Susannah M. Smith on Walter Benjamin
Peering into Walter Benjamin's Archive I don't know you, WB. I don't know you at all. I'm thinking of the way people seem to hear about you serendipitously, repeatedly. I'm thinking of the leather suitcase that disappeared after you died, its contents alleged but never located: postcards, a manuscript, a pipe, morphine. You are gone...
Ken Babstock on Paul Muldoon
HOW POEMS WORK KEN BABSTOCK Hay By Paul Muldoon This much I know. Just as I'm about to make that right turn off Province Line Road I meet another beat-up Volvo carrying a load of hay. (More accurately, a bale of lucerne on the roof rack, a bale of lucerne or fescue...
Michael Redhill on Lisa Robertson
Click on poem to advance. Monday -- From The Weather, New Star Books (2001) And poetry can also be sculpture, or at least more like sculpture than it's like conversation. Lisa Robertson's Monday , from her collection The Weather, is a poem that defies immediate analysis, although even the most perplexed reader will still be able to state a...
Lisa Robertson on Peter Culley
The Provisions BY PETER CULLEY Between the storms of October And the storms of March the deep, wide trench Of this afternoon, one of a series making up This temporal lapse, this interregnum In which we are involved. Ignorant as I am I hardly dare to speak of it, But the fabric of its projection...
Ken Babstock on Glyn Maxwell
PORTOBELLO by Glyn Maxwell When you were the one reading My palm, in the second hour of our one life, And I, sitting back for good and noticing white stuff Suddenly falling on Portobello and staying, You couldn't for all the books in the world have learned More than one watching us, Who buttered his...
Ken Babstock on Helen Humphreys
Installation BY HELEN HUMPHREYS What we make doesn't recover from us. Twisted scaffold, trellis of rust. This is how we will be gone. The steel hull grinning with rivets. Shiny notes of chrome swinging from the stave of the wrecker's wall. Those we loved and nothing for that. The moon a chalk circle over dark...
Lisa Robertson on Dionne Brand
In another place, not here, a woman might touch something between beauty and nowhere, back there and here, might pass hand over hand her own trembling life, but I have tried to imagine a sea not bleeding, a girl's glance full as a verse, a woman growing old and never crying to a radio hissing...
How Poems Work: Ken Babstock on David O’Meara
Field-Crossing by DAVID O'MEARA The clover's razed; the ground is autumn-hard. The land bristles in a ragged frame. I'm on the far end, watching weightless clouds hastened by wind, the day dark but huge with a muscled rustling. A hydro pole impales the midriff of the field — a world-tree ripe with announcements; a pivot staking...
