A rumination on responsibility, inheritance, and how we both accept and reject them, Nick Thran’s Mayor Snow (Nightwood Editions) pairs political discord and corruption with the cozy domesticity of the Al Purdy A-Frame. No wonder, then, that Thran’s own inheritance – that of the influence of Purdy and other poets like Anne Carson – is beautifully alluded to through found dialogues and sharply contrasted with oppressive political atmospheres. The end result is a darkly humourous meditation on power and how it’s subverted through the everyday.
By:
ALU Editor
Share It:
A rumination on responsibility, inheritance, and how we both accept and reject them, Nick Thran’s Mayor Snow (Nightwood Editions) pairs political discord and corruption with the cozy domesticity of the Al Purdy A-Frame. No wonder, then, that Thran’s own inheritance – that of the influence of Purdy and other poets like Anne Carson – is beautifully alluded to through found dialogues and sharply contrasted with oppressive political atmospheres. The end result is a darkly humourous meditation on power and how it’s subverted through the everyday.Read an excerpt from Mayor Snow below, and then check out more of how Thran’s influences came to shape this stunning collection.ALU: Which particular poets or poetry collections have most inspired your writing?Nick Thran: In a perceptive review of Mayor Snow for Quill and Quire, poet Jacob McArthur Mooney compared the “Mayor” section of my book to Anne Carson’s sequence “The Life of Towns.” The similarities hadn’t occurred to me before, but it’s absolutely true that Carson’s work is a touchstone. Al Purdy’s an obvious influence on the first section, albeit a more circumstantial one. In fact, I wrote a prose diary while in residence at the A-frame, and one of the things that I did in the middle of that piece is create a lively domestic dialogue built entirely out of lines from Purdy’s poems about marriage and lines form Carson’s long poem The Beauty of the Husband. That was a joy to do.ALU: Are you inspired by a particular place, thing, or someone other than another poet?NT: Mayor Snow contains poems written in Ameliasburgh, in New York City, in Toronto, in Fredericton and in Montreal. I’ve tried to be receptive to conversations with the particulars of each place. And there have always been non-poets in my life whose opinions of my work I value and, in many ways, measure my progress against. I might not show them my work in draft form as much any more, but I always seek out their opinions of the finished collections.ALU: Do you have any particular writing rituals?NT: My writing only goes as well as my reading. The ritual begins with other books.* * *Find Mayor Snow and more on our interactive poetry web, or find it on our poetry web poster. Check out the other Woven Odes featured poets in celebration of National Poetry Month here.
