All Books

Direct and Devious Ways is Katharine Beeman’s first book of poetry. In this collection, we are introduced to a mature poet who is politically aware rather than politically correct. She is at ease with the body sensual and the body politic.

In several long sequences of precise lyrics, small songs and “narrowed prayers,” Reid casts a paleontologist’s eye on the accumulations of everyday life, the remains of the near and distant past. Objects, those accretions of memory, are taken down from the shelving and dusted off by a mind hungry for meaning and transcendence. This is a poetry that asks the big questions: What survives, and what may be revealed by listening to the “erotic murmur of material things?” In so many of these moving poems, time is telescoped and small human figures are set against a stark backdrop of barrens, desert places, stones and “an excess of bones.” There are meditations on the arrogance of seeking such emptiness, and also on the various places and provisional dwellings we come to call home: a cabin fastened into place “by sticking the chimney into the mist,” a crumbling Cuban love hotel and “the faintly luminous tents that have gathered like so many eyes / around the fire in the desert…” Here be wonders.

John Terpstra’s Disarmament is a new collection of poems from one of Canada’s great literary craftsmen. Ranging over difficult terrain, from Port-au-Prince to the Iroquois Bar, Terpstra is always able–through keen observation and playful, thoughtful use of language–to locate the moral centre. Terpstra’s poems open and close distances–between the present and the past, parent and child, one country and another, the old world and the new, teacher and student, presence and absence, the human and the divine.

Finalist for the 2004 Governor General’s Award for Poetry.

With breathtaking virtuosity, Garry Thomas Morse sets out to recover the appropriated, stolen and scattered world of his ancestral people from Alert Bay to Quadra Island to Vancouver, retracing Captain Vancouver’s original sailing route. These poems draw upon both written history and oral tradition to reflect all of the respective stories of the community, which vocally weave in and out of the dialogics of the text.

A dramatic symphony of many voices, Discovery Passages uncovers the political, commercial, intellectual and cultural subtexts of the Native ­language ban, the potlatch ban and the confiscation and sale of Aboriginal artifacts to museums by Indian agents, and how these actions affected the lives of both Native and non-Native inhabitants of the region. This displacement of language and artifacts reverberated as a profound cultural disjuncture on a personal level for the author’s ­people, the Kwakwaka’wakw, as their family and tribal possessions became at once both museum artifacts and a continuation of the ­tradition of memory through another language. Morse’s continuous poetic dialogue of “discovery” and “recovery” reaches as far as the Lenape, the original Native inhabitants of Mannahatta in what is now known as New York, and on across the Atlantic in pursuit of the European roots of the “Voyages of Discovery” in the works of Sappho, Socrates, Virgil and Frazer’s The Golden Bough, only to reappear on the American continent to find their psychotic apotheosis in the poetry of Duncan Campbell Scott.

With tales of Chiefs Billy Assu, Harry Assu and James Sewid; the ­family story “The Young Healer”; and transformed passages from Whitman, Pound, Williams and Bowering, Discovery Passages links Kwakwaka’wakw traditions of the past with contemporary poetic ­tradition in B.C. that encompasses the entire scope of ­relations between oral and vocal ­tradition, ancient ritual, historical ­contextuality and our continuing rites.