The Oysters I Bring to Banquets

Gary Geddes’s new collection of lyrics and poem-sequences ranges from whimsical poems about the building of a greenhouse to the struggle of characters in classical legends to cope with the interference of close relatives and extended family, the gods. And poems about Yukon adventures and the wonders and plight of monarch butterflies in Mexican highlands. It’s also a diverse gathering of elegies for friends, literary luminaries, creatures and natural habitats in a world under siege, but also a series of hymns to art, beauty, human dignity and endurance.

AUTHOR

Gary Geddes

Gary Geddes has written and edited more than fifty books of poetry, fiction, drama, non-fiction, criticism, translation and anthologies, including 20th-Century Poetry and Poetics, and won a dozen national and international literary awards, including the Commonwealth Poetry Prize (Americas Region), Lt.-Governor’s Award for Literary Excellence, and the Gabriela Mistral Prize.

Reviews

No detail escapes this poet’s attention. And yet his subtle superb craftsmanship, polished after decades of experience and reading, is delicately concealed. His poetry liberates the ordinary; he is a word-carpenter in whose hands each poem does its own dance of discovery. His carefully considered word choice revives the language in new ways … The poems of Gary Geddes are the oysters he brings to our banquet table; they are aphrodisiacs, high in protein, full of flavour. These are poems you cannot do without. They’ll knock you off your feet.