The Watchmaker’s Table

By (author): Brian Bartlett

In his most personal collection to date, Brian Bartlett meditates upon time and family. We share his son’s discovery of newborn spiders and his daughter’s first grasp of infinity as a concept. In companion poems on the births of his mother and father, Bartlett makes you feel as if you were alive at those moments in history. The opening poem, “All the Train Trips,” displays an uncanny sense of homes and families lost and the casual friendships struck up in conversations in the “bar car.” “Pearly Everlasting” expresses a longing to register the world in the body through the naming of flowers.

Books and the history of poetry shape time for Bartlett, whether in found poems woven from the words of books inherited from ancestors or in the words of great poets that, despite the distance, convey a shared sense of humanity. Wrestling with time as if he were both Jacob and the angel, Bartlett speaks both for time’s dominion and for human mutability.

AUTHOR

Brian Bartlett

Brian Bartlett has published many collections and chapbooks of poetry, including The Watchmaker?s Table, The Afterlife of Trees, Granite Erratics, and Wanting the Day: Selected Poems, along with one prose book, Ringing Here & There: A Nature Calendar, with another forthcoming in 2017. He resides in Halifax, Nova Scotia.

Reviews

This book of unassumingly daring poems is Brian Bartlett’s most personal and historical collection, filled with the lives of his family, ancestors, and neighbours. Bartlett finds poetry in crossword puzzles, an island’s flotsam and jetsam, a young soldier’s letters, and his son’s discovery of newborn spiders.

A meditation upon time, The Watchmaker’s Table includes an address to Time itself, apocalyptic visions of a stark future, and a watch’s wanderings. Wrestling with the years as if he were both Jacob and the angel, Bartlett presents a startling evocation of time’s dominion and human mutability.


“A series of inventive, subtle and deeply cutting speculations on the passage of time.”

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Excerpts & Samples ×

In his most personal collection to date, Brian Bartlett meditates upon time and family. We share his son’s discovery of newborn spiders and his daughter’s first grasp of infinity as a concept. In companion poems on the births of his mother and father, Bartlett makes you feel as if you were alive at those moments in history. The opening poem, “All the Train Trips,” displays an uncanny sense of homes and families lost and the casual friendships struck up in conversations in the “bar car.” “Pearly Everlasting” expresses a longing to register the world in the body through the naming of flowers.

Books and the history of poetry shape time for Bartlett, whether in found poems woven from the words of books inherited from ancestors or in the words of great poets that, despite the distance, convey a shared sense of humanity. Wrestling with time as if he were both Jacob and the angel, Bartlett speaks both for time’s dominion and for human mutability.

Reader Reviews

Details

Dimensions:

136 Pages
8.5in * 5.5in * 0.36in
185gr

Published:

March 14, 2008

Publisher:

Goose Lane Editions

ISBN:

9780864925084

9780864928061 – PDF

Book Subjects:

POETRY / Canadian

Featured In:

All Books

Language:

eng

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