Skip to main content

Poem by Angela Hibbs

Eyewear is delighted to welcome Angela Hibbs this Friday, and not just because, as you can see, she is wearing glasses. Her first collection of poetry, Passport, came out in 2006, from Montreal's DC Books New Writers Series. It's an impressive debut. As major Canadian poet David McGimpsey said, she writes "with tender insight and passionate care."

Hibbs has been published in good magazines: Exile, Matrix, Fireweed, and Antigonish Review. She is a graduate of Concordia University's Creative Writing Master of Arts Degree. Born in Newfoundland, she has lived in most Canadian provinces and now in Quebec. Aware both of Sexton's wry confessional urgency, and De Lillo's ordered, pop-savvy postmodernity, she is one of the best emerging Canadian poets, tossing the salad of the style of what's said. Look out for her next collection.


Steve's Monologue

slip and snivel
spine & knees; scabs
abound like knots
in wood. Sydney nibbled
her scabs. Smooth,
even on feet & elbows.
Smell her skin.
Drying between her toes
after a bath, her milk teeth
standing at attention all along
her laughter. Her teeth,
eyes, eyebrows and hair
white, her body blue black, a negative
of herself.

Quick heart
scurries, her small
feet strike the stairs.

Felled; a pencil tip
stabbed into her palm, right angles & bisections;
her hand fills the frame.
I popped it out, patted her hair
‘til her sniffling stopped. A decimal of lead remained.

The sap of her,
spills, sticky,
wets the yellow hair on her legs.
Young trees bend before breaking.


poem by Angela Hibbs

Comments

"decimal of lead remained"

Good one. Nice.

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.  What do I mean by smart?

"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