Skip to main content

Spring Quartet

Spring's sprung rhythm will hopefully gash gold soon. In the meantime, an (edited version of) a press release from one of Canada's most dynamic (and impressive) new small poetry presses:

Quartet 2006 / The Passionate Edge

Frontenac House is pleased to celebrate its sixth year of poetry publishing with another dazzling quartet of books and poets. Join us for one of the launches of Quartet 2006, an evening of richly spun poetry. It promises to be a great party, with readings, discussion, refreshments, and door prizes.

The Launches:

Thursday, April 20, 7:00 p.m. at Memorial Park Library, 1221-2nd Street, SW, Calgary,
with Pages Books on Kensington as our bookseller.

Monday, April 24, 7:00 p.m. at the Edward Day Gallery, 952 Queen St. W., Toronto,
with University of Toronto Bookstore as our bookseller


The Books

A Bad Year for Journalists by Lisa Pasold
In Pasold's poetry we hear the dissonant music of a broken and brutal world, its static and its ragged breathlessness. ~ Cecelia Woloch, author of Late, Tsigan and Sacrifice

Pearl by Nancy Jo Cullen
Cullen's poetry is a sassy, assertive attack, irreverent in the way that all who question tradition remind us what it is to be human and strike out at what holds us back. ~ The Jury, Alberta Books Awards

Tear Down by Ali Riley
Riley's formally wild poems work in waves, like musical movements building in intensity - a thrashing rock opera. ~ Sonnet L'Abbe, The Globe and Mail

The Lightness Which Is Our World, Seen from Afar by Ven Begamudre
Circling around the same but separate suns of East and West, Begamudre is a writer of extraordinarily eccentric talent. ~ Eve Drobot, The Globe and Mail

The Poets

All four poets of Quartet 2006 were nominated for literary honours for their previous work. Pasold, a Canadian journalist living in Paris, for Alberta Best Trade Book; Riley for the Gerald Lampert Award; and Cullen for the Gerald Lampert Award, Best Alberta Poetry book and Best Alberta Trade Book. Ven Begamudre, who was the Markin-Flanagan Writer in Residence at the University of Calgary in 1994, won the F.G. Bressani Literary Prize for Prose, and the City of Regina Writing Award. His book Laterna Magika was a finalist in the Commonwealth Writer's Prize.

Be sure to visit our web site www.frontenachouse.com

Comments

efpalinos said…
No poem today for world poetry day?!

Popular posts from this blog

IQ AND THE POETS - ARE YOU SMART?

When you open your mouth to speak, are you smart?  A funny question from a great song, but also, a good one, when it comes to poets, and poetry. We tend to have a very ambiguous view of intelligence in poetry, one that I'd say is dysfunctional.  Basically, it goes like this: once you are safely dead, it no longer matters how smart you were.  For instance, Auden was smarter than Yeats , but most would still say Yeats is the finer poet; Eliot is clearly highly intelligent, but how much of Larkin 's work required a high IQ?  Meanwhile, poets while alive tend to be celebrated if they are deemed intelligent: Anne Carson, Geoffrey Hill , and Jorie Graham , are all, clearly, very intelligent people, aside from their work as poets.  But who reads Marianne Moore now, or Robert Lowell , smart poets? Or, Pound ?  How smart could Pound be with his madcap views? Less intelligent poets are often more popular.  John Betjeman was not a very smart poet, per se....

"I have crossed oceans of time to find you..."

In terms of great films about, and of, love, we have Vertigo, In The Mood for Love , and Casablanca , Doctor Zhivago , An Officer and a Gentleman , at the apex; as well as odder, more troubling versions, such as Sophie's Choice and  Silence of the Lambs .  I think my favourite remains Bram Stoker's Dracula , with the great immortal line "I have crossed oceans of time to find you...".

THE SWIFT REPORT 2023

I am writing this post without much enthusiasm, but with a sense of duty. This blog will be 20 years old soon, and though I rarely post here anymore, I owe it some attention. Of course in 2023, "Swift" now means one thing only, Taylor Swift, the billionaire musician. Gone are the days when I was asked if I was related to Jonathan Swift. The pre-eminent cultural Swift is now alive and TIME PERSON OF THE YEAR. There is no point in belabouring the obvious with delay: 2023 was a low-point in the low annals of human history - war, invasion, murder, in too many nations. Hate, division, the collapse of what truth is, exacerbated by advances in AI that may or may not prove apocalyptic, while global warming still seems to threaten the near-future safety of humanity. It's been deeply depressing. The world lost some wonderful poets, actors, musicians, and writers this year, as it often does. Two people I knew and admired greatly, Ian Ferrier and Kevin Higgins, poets and organise...