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Windstorm

By (author): Joe Denham

Windstorm is a passport to the place where chaos and form meet; Denham’s timeless ethereal gaze is rooted in the mastery of poetic forms such as the sonnet and Dante’s terza rima. These quiet, forceful poems explore heaven, earth and sea with arresting images, ideas and words. Like the wind, Denham’s poetry has the power to move.in the windsong. This is no translation,this long-line tow trawling the abyssal silt, oceanic-soul, in the low opalinelight sifting down through fire’s alburnum.–excerpt, Windstorm

AUTHOR

Joe Denham

Joe Denham is the author of four collections of poetry, including Regeneration Machine (Nightwood Editions, 2015), which won the Canadian Authors Association Award for Poetry and was a finalist for the 2016 Governor General’s Literary Award for Poetry. Denham is also the author of a novel, The Year of Broken Glass. His work has appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies, including Open Field: 30 Contemporary Canadian Poets (Persea Books, 2005) as well as Spindrift (Douglas & McIntyre, 2017). He lives with his wife and two children in Halfmoon Bay, BC.


Reviews

Praise for Joe Denham’s previous work:

Denham is as comfortable with the daily violence–psychic and actual–of urban life as he is with the small-town world of boats and lines in the water. Junkies and garbage strikes are as strikingly, and lovingly, depicted as ‘a lakeshore lined with alder, maple, fir.’ The pastoral is juxtaposed against a world “ripped on caffeine … lush on home wine and the perfume of a young woman.”
Quill & Quire

With a lyric intensity refreshingly free of pop pyrotechnics, Joe Denham’s poems pull compelling music from work, love and grief.
–John Pass

Joe Denham’s first book, Flux, opens with graphic, empathetic work poetry. Almost every line reverberates with layered alliteration, assonance, consonance … extended in frequent imagery of music. A short long poem remembering his native Sechelt Peninsula urges alerting ourselves to the slow things that define the lure of the local.
Canadian Literature
Rather than a collection of standalone lyrics, the five untitled sections spin an extended meditation on work, the environment, and humanity, on the sacred and the profane. [Denham] weds the active to the contemplative and eschews pat moralizing and trendy poses, resulting in poetry complex enough to mirror the contradictions and ambivalences of life. Throughout this collection, [he] evinces an awareness that solid craftsmanship is one possible antidote to conspicuous consumption and waste. One thing is for sure: this is no disposable book. I can’t recommend it highly enough.–Zachariah Wells, Quill & Quire
Windstorm is extremely well-informed in its project: an extended praise-song/elegy for the ocean and enunciation of those who have contributed to its ruin. … Sometimes working in terza rima, the rhyming three-line form created by Dante, sometimes in sonnets, sometimes in free verse, Denham repeats lines and images, but the repetition works. Windstorm is a book you lean into; its combination of passion for subject matter and hard-earned craft is almost enough to bowl a reader over.–Winnipeg Free Press
Easily the most under-discussed book of the year. An important moment for Denham, I think, moving from a way of looking and hearing to a more expansive and contemplative vista. This book feels like it’s preparing for more.–Lemon Hound
Windstorm … speeds through work, pain, love and savage nature. We expect the language of the worker to be simple and concrete, but this book is an anomaly. It is not easily accessible poetry. It is chaotic and fierce, like the weather it describes. However, if you lean into it hard enough you will see the forests swaying and falling, hear the sea rumbling and imagine the many creatures, whales and crustaceans, floating beneath. –Jan Degrass, Coast Reporter (BC)

Awards

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Excerpts & Samples ×
Windstorm is a passport to the place where chaos and form meet; Denham’s timeless ethereal gaze is rooted in the mastery of poetic forms such as the sonnet and Dante’s terza rima. These quiet, forceful poems explore heaven, earth and sea with arresting images, ideas and words. Like the wind, Denham’s poetry has the power to move.in the windsong. This is no translation,this long-line tow trawling the abyssal silt, oceanic-soul, in the low opalinelight sifting down through fire’s alburnum.–excerpt, Windstorm

Reader Reviews

Details

Dimensions:

72 Pages
8in * 5.5in * 0.25in
0.44lb

Published:

September 23, 2009

Publisher:

Nightwood Editions

ISBN:

9780889712430

Book Subjects:

POETRY / Canadian

Featured In:

All Books

Language:

eng

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Related Blog Posts

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Other books by Joe Denham

Flux

By (author): Joe Denham

Landfall

By (author): Joe Denham