Forget-Sadness-Grass

The sixth collection of poetry from the award-winning poet; Antony Di Nardo takes the reader on a journey into and through mortality, nostalgia, memories of home, lost love, forgetting, the cycle of loss and unexpected yet welcome discovery, with the resilient daylily as an ever present companion; the collection is told with Di Nardos customary grace, modesty, rhythm and precision; poems to learn from, be moved by, surprised by and encouraged by. COMP. TITLES: Skylight, Antony Di Nardo (2018, Ronsdale Press); It Doesnt Matter What We Meant, Rob Winger (2021, Penguin Random House); As Far as You Know, A.F. Mortiz (2020, House of Anansi)
Antony Di Nardo delves into mortality, memory, and the cycles of loss and discovery with a sublime precision that relies on the sonic and visual play of language. His poetry surprises as much as it illuminates.
The title for Di Nardo’s sixth collection comes from the Chinese ideogram for daylily, that tawny orange blossom, which bursts its borders in the summer and, in this book, finds its way into poetry that blurs the line between mysticism and lyricism.

AUTHOR

Antony Di Nardo

Antony Di Nardo is a poet and teacher. He currently divides his time between Beirut, Lebanon—where he teaches English at International College—and central Canada. He is the author of two previous collections of poems: Alien, Correspondent (Brick Books, 2010) and Soul on Standby (Exile Editions, 2010).

Reviews

“This is a wonderfully variegated collection, where the poet evokes the life of the daylily, meditating on its beauty, couture, and transience, making surprising and mysterious connections to our personal experiences while expressing universal truths.” – Laurence Hutchman, Author of In The Writers Words: Conversations with Ten Canadian Poets
“Antony Di Nardo’s Forget-Sadness-Grass is an ode to the daylily on the surface, and so much more as you peel away the layers. Although he frames his collection through the lens of a daylily, Di Nardo is actually teaching us to recognize our smallness in the vastness of the universe while at the same time taking in every element of beauty and paying homage to nature’s wisdom. He gives us a recipe for living and for life in this extraordinary collection that only through going back to the earth, defies ends” – Carolyne Van Der Meer, author of Sensorial
Selected by CBC as a poetry collection to watch for this fall.