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The Girls with Stone Faces
By Arleen Pare
A long poem memorializing the art and lives of sculptors Frances Loring and Florence Wyle.
Arleen Paré, in her first book-length poem after her Governor General Literary Award?winning Lake of Two Mountains, turns her cool, benevolent eye to the shared lives of Florence Wyle ... Read more
Overview
A long poem memorializing the art and lives of sculptors Frances Loring and Florence Wyle.
Arleen Paré, in her first book-length poem after her Governor General Literary Award?winning Lake of Two Mountains, turns her cool, benevolent eye to the shared lives of Florence Wyle and Frances Loring, two of Canada's greatest artists, whose sculptures she comes face to face with at the National Gallery of Canada. In the guise of a curator, Paré takes us on a moving, carefully structured tour through the rooms where their work is displayed, the Gallery's walls falling away to travel in time to Chicago (where they met at art school and fell in love in the 1910s), New York, and Toronto (where they lived and worked for the next six decades). Along the way, Paré looks at fashions in art, the politics of gender, and the love that longtime proximity calls forth in us. The Girls with Stone Faces is one of the finest collections of poetry about the lives of artists — and most importantly their work — to appear in Canada in many years.
Although Wyle and Loring were well known during their lifetimes, they have dropped out of common memory. Paré's collection is art loving art, women loving women, words loving shape, poetry loving stone, the curve of jaw, the trajectory of days.
"? Like the sculpted female figures she describes as 'tacking their bodies against the history of storm,' Paré has positioned her own graceful, finely chiselled lines to recast the history of women in art, in society, in love. " — Anita Lahey
"? A distinctive and memorable book, sympathetic and gloriously questioning. " — Stephanie Bolster
Arleen Pare
Arleen Pare's first book, Paper Trail, won the Victoria Butler Book Prize and was shortlisted for the Dorothy Livesay BC Book Prize in Poetry. Pare completed an MFA in poetry at the University of Victoria and her poetry and prose have appeared in a number of Canadian literary journals. Before beginning a career in writing, she worked as a social worker for two decades in mental health housing in Vancouver. She now lives in Victoria with her partner, and has two sons and two grandsons.
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In Review: The Week of September 4th
Where in Canada: The Girls with Stone Faces
The National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa was the inspirational site where author Arleen Paré first began thinking about Florence Wyle and Frances Loring, the two women who later became the centre of The Girls with Stone Faces (Brick Books).
- Dimensions 104 pages, 6.00 x 8.75 x .40 in
- Published September 1, 2017
- Publisher Brick Books
- Category Poetry
- Keywords Canadian , Women Authors , Gay & Lesbian
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- EPUB Accessibility Specification 1.0 AA
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