Archive for the 'Poetry' Category

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Here in Waterloo, Ontario, the weather is in the low 20s celsius (70s for the fahrenheit folks). It’s gorgeously sunny and warm and people are defecting like flies for the long Easter weekend. A perfect start to poetry month, evoking lines of verse like “I wandered lonely, as a cloud….”

We love poetry here at Laurier Press and publish a bunch of books to prove it. Here’s a selection from Mobility of Light: The Poetry of Nicole Brossard, selected with an introduction by Louise H. Forsyth. The poems in this book are presented in their original French along with English versions, some previously translated, some newly translated for this volume by Louise Forsyth.

Installation

chaque matin je m’intéresse à la vie
de grands détours et des preuves
au cœur de la langue des pans de siècle
icônes, soies, souvent manuscrits
le corps impair des femmes
les grands séismes
de loin ça se voit
je m’installe dans mon corps
de manière à pouvoir bouger
quand une femme me fait signe

Installation

every morning I take an interest in life
huge detours and proofs
the tail ends of century at the heart of language
icons, silks, often manuscripts
the odd-numbered body of women
great quakes
visible from afar
I settle into my body’s installation
so as to be able to respond
when a woman gives me a sign

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We continue to grow the Laurier Poetry series with the latest volume, Verse and Worse: Selected and New Poems of Steve McCaffery 1989–2009, selected with an introduction by Darren Wershler.  Here’s a sample. Please ask for the book in your local bookstore to read more. Have you considered using these books to teach Canadian poetry? Ask us about a price bundle.

Correlata for a Cryptogram

It looks like California outside
the mudslides of pure mascara
but it’s been said before:
you can’t give an inch a new nail.

Curious, however,
the return to the mystic writing pad
for just the briefest scribble
of top-right Celtomania.

Around these parts
simultaneity in claws is
the puma’s best form of disappearance
just follow the arrow from the national diagonals
to reach the correlata for a cyrptogram
around the throat of America

the way milk escapes the entire history
of its blackness.

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It’s National Poetry Day in the UK today, and although we are a Canadian press, we sell widely in the UK so I thought I would mark the occasion by posting a poem from our latest volume in the Laurier Poetry series, The False Laws of Narrative: The Poetry of Fred Wah, selected with an introduction by Louis Cabri.

(sentenced)

is not
the string
of words
a sentence

is not
the voice
comes out
another’s

is not
the thought
complete
before it

speak
is not
the mind
a knotted

string not
words that
only seem
not meant

to mean
or sent
not strung
to end

but tied
to cradle
each
to each

Fred Wah
Originally from Sentenced to Light (Talonbooks, 2008)

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It’s buzz, buzz, buzz around here these days as we pay for the lazy days of summer. Three new titles this week and a brand new catalogue to produce. Didn’t we just finish one? This weekend I’m involved personally in the Eden Mills Writers’ Festival, where I coordinate the authors who write for Young Adults. Eden Mills is an outdoor festival, so along with all the other stresses, we also worry about rain, but this year looks good so I’m hoping for a good turnout.

Next week WLU Press will have a booth at Word on the Street in Kitchener. That’s always a good day. I’m torn between wanting to be part of the big Toronto festival and thoroughly enjoying interacting with our smaller community in beautiful Victoria Park.

We recently exhibited our books at the American Political Science Association conference in Toronto, and coming up we will be attending, for both sales and acquisitions, the American Association for Religion conference in Montreal and the annual conference for the Association for Canadian Studies in the United States (ACSUS) in San Diego. No, I am not lucky enough to be sent to San Diego in November, more’s the pity. That one goes to the boss.

Be sure to check out our new releases below and ask your favourite independent bookstore to stock them if they haven’t already.

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