Shall

In Shall: ghazals, Catherine Owen has created a collection of spare and haunting beauty. These poems, based on the Persian ghazal form, catalogue a series of losses. Those of a mother whose child is growing up and away, those of a wife losing a marriage, and overarching all of this, the loss nature suffers at the hands of humanity. Each poem is jewel-bright and sharply facetted. There are no excess words in Owen?s writing, her images and observations are all distilled to their essence. Shall: ghazals is a piercingly powerful collection.

AUTHOR

Catherine Owen

Catherine Owen is an Edmonton-based poet (formerly of Vancouver) whose work has been published in national and international journals such as ‘Queen’s Quarterly’ and ‘Poetry Salzburg’. Her first book ‘Somatic: The Life and Work of Egon Schiele’ (Exile Editions, 1998) was nominated for the Gerald Lampert Award while her second, ‘The Wrecks of Eden’ (Wolsak and Wynn, 2002) was short listed for the BC Book Prize. Her most recent collections are ‘Cusp/detritus’ (Anvil Press, 2006) and’Shall: Ghazals’ (Wolsak and Wynn, 2006). Her work has also appeared in the anthologies ‘A Practice of Spirit'(St Thomas Poetry Series 2002) and a collection of tributes to Joe Rosenblatt (Guernica Editions 2005).