E Y E W E A R, THE BLOG - FREEDOM MEANS BEING UNAFRAID TO WRITE WHAT YOU THINK

Eyewear is very pleased to offer a new poem by Penelope Shuttle , this autumn Sunday.  Her new book, Sandgrain and Hourglass , is just out from Bloodaxe, and is a Poetry Book Society Recommendation.  It will be reviewed here soon. Loss I search the lake shore every morning for medicines, and for that silver cub, fame Autumn does his best to make up for the unfinished chapters of our life, as does the dark-bright gaze of the little living goddess of Kathmandue on today’s front page For a million years, God struggled to create the cat from the lion’s sneeze, took another million years to perfect the whale’s heartbeat - Surely I can bear, for my short lifespan, these five wounds of loss in my hands, feet and heart no herb can heal, no season, not even autumn, knows how to bear poem by Penelope Shuttle

"Well, you built up a world of magic," Hayley Williams taunts, halfway though the Paramore track "Brick By Boring Brick", "because your real life is tragic." If it's a dig at fans of Stephenie Meyer 's supernatural romance saga, Twilight , it's a particularly snide one - as Paramore contributed two tracks to the movie soundtrack. But it hits hard and hurts, like a bitchy heel-stamp, because it fits the stereotype.The Twilight fan of popular caricature has graduated from Harry Potter's Hogwarts only to mope around magic college, mooning over pale vampires and buff werewolves. The Twilight franchise is the cultural equivalent of an emo teenager's bedroom, with all its melancholy self-indulgence and its unattainable pin-ups. More specifically, it's a teenage girl's bedroom. Twilight 's protagonist, Bella Swan, is effectively a blank, a screen for the viewer to protect herself onto and into, and be faced with the ...

Eyewear is very glad to welcome American poet Dean Rader (pictured) this autumnal mid-October Friday. Rader has published widely in the fields of poetry, American Indian studies, and popular culture.  His debut collection of poems, Works & Days , won the 2010 T. S. Eliot Poetry Prize (American version), judged by Claudia Keelan .  In 2009, Kelly Cherry selected his poem “Hesiod in Oklahoma, 1934” for the prestigious Sow’s Ear Poetry Prize .  He is the author of a best-selling textbook on writing and popular culture, The World is a Text (with Jonathan Silverman ), which just went into its fourth edition. With poet Janice Gould , he co-edited Speak To Me Words: Essays on Contemporary American Indian Poetry (University of Arizona Press, 2003), the first collection of essays devoted to Native American poetry.  Most recently, he curated a special issue of Sentence devoted to American Indian prose poetry.  His newest scholarly book, Engaged Resistan...

As The Guardian observes today, Joe Mantell , sadly, has died.  As they also note, for a little-known character actor, he got to say some very famous movie lines.  Arguably, his "forget it Jake, it's Chinatown" is the greatest last line of any film, barring perhaps "I am having an old friend for dinner" and "Nobody's perfect", so he was lucky - but also talented, he imbued that brief sentiment with so much ambiguous darkness it carries a whole social vision of hell on earth with it.

This is a good link to a listing and bloggish discussion of the shortlisted poets for this year's Governor General's awards for poetry.  I have had my eye on British poets over at The Best American Poetry blog and almost missed this.  Welcome surprises - Circus is nominated, by Michael Harris , and so is the latest Daryl Hine collection.  They are both poets deserving of a wider Canadian readership, so that's great.  This is a notable turn to a more "British" line of formalism and style than past lists.

Howard Jacobson has just won this year's Man Booker Prize - hats off to him.  I am sort of glad he pipped the expected winner, C, to the post, because C was a semi-unreadable pastiche of modernism (post-modernism_ about semi-conductors, etc, that couldn't get its horticulture right.  Cue famous quip. Uncue.  Jacobson got a lot of press this week in many papers, bemoaning the state of the serious UK novel, and he is right, to a point, but don't tell me Waugh, Amis and Wodehouse are not revered, in their own way.  His argument on the BBC this morning that novels should always be funny (read a poem he said, if you want seriousness!) rings hollow.  Comedy as an element in all great works of literature: absolutely!  But should the default position of any form or genre be one tone, one vision?  I am not so sure.  Tragi-comic, seems the way to go.  Best of both words.

Padhraig Nolan reviews Continental Shelf by Fred D'Aguiar In Continental Shelf , Fred D’Aguiar has produced a body of work concerned with rigorous observation of a world thrown into turmoil by unforeseen trauma. The book is divided into three sections. The first – roughly a third of the book – is a set of poems drawing predominantly on memories of his early life in colonial Guyana. This section is entitled Local Colour and while that title may contain subtextual intentions, the poems within rarely trouble the reader with anything more substantial than lighter, anecdotal implications. Through local characters, patois, textures, wildlife - including a strikingly camouflaged caiman - and a gift for vivid scene-setting, an agrarian childhood in a tropical climate is sketched out in close detail, as in Tamarind Season ; “Tamarinds hide all summer for us to find them, Gnarled fists closed around our hopes, Keepsakes for mouths starved of sour things,” Oncoming modernisation feature...