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Afloat, John Reibetanz's eighth collection of poetry, focuses on water in many manifestations. The centerpiece, a sequence on the Three Gorges Dam and its cultural and environmental implications, brings ancient Chinese sources (Meng Chiao and the painter Dong Yuan) together ... Read more
Afloat, John Reibetanz's eighth collection of poetry, focuses on water in many manifestations. The centerpiece, a sequence on the Three Gorges Dam and its cultural and environmental implications, brings ancient Chinese sources (Meng Chiao and the painter Dong Yuan) together with modern ones (Edward Burtynsky's photographs and violent video games) to create an elegy that is moving and meditative.
Although water is everywhere present as a subject, it is song that provides the motivating power, the vehicle of longing that animates the book. "We thirst for song"Ñthe closing words of the Lament for the Gorges sequenceÑcould really serve as the book's epigraph. This is poetry exercising its full range of possible functions (to observe, to enquire, to elegize, to imagine, to think, to commemorate, to yearn and to feel), all in the service of that "thirst for song. "
John Reibetanz lives in Toronto and teaches at Victoria College. His poems have appeared in such magazines as Poetry (Chicago), The Paris Review, Canadian Literature, The Malahat Review, and Quarry. His previous collections, Ashbourn and Morning Watch, were published in the Signal Editions series of Véhicule Press. He was a finalist for the 1995 National Magazine Awards.
"The cosmopolitan, lyrical meditations in Afloat, John Reibetanz's eighth collection, are reminders that humankind also has a capacity for beauty" -- Barbara Carey, Toronto Star
"[A] feast for all who love transfigurative, transformative poetry. " -- George Elliott Clarke, Halifax Chronicle-Herald
"These poems . .. gesture toward exceeding their bounds, to discovery not as colonization but as encounter . .. Afloat aims to renew and to revitalize poetic resonance. " -- Kevin McNeilly, EVENT
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