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When Earth Leaps Up

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  • Publisher:
    Brick Books, 2006
    Note: This book was purchased with support from the Government of Canada's Social Development Partnerships Program - Disability Component.

Details:

  • Date:
    Created
    2006
    Summary:

    Edited by Mark Abley; Preface by Hilary Clark; Afterword by Mark Abley

    ” … one of Canada’s major poets. The audacity – the courage – of her imagination teaches us, gives us our better selves.” — Tim Lilburn

    This posthumous collection will be a delightful surprise for readers who thought they had heard the last of Anne Szumigalski’s nimble, sideslipping, otherworldly voice. Szumigalski’s poetic universe is as beguiling and unpredictable as dreams and myth, and like them, her universe can be enchanting, visually lush, and suddenly dangerous.

    Untitled (“glory to the queen …”)

    glory to the queen whoever she is
    wherever she finds herself as she moves
    up and down round and round
    all the spaces that are hers

    once she was a young thing and jumped
    easily over any fence any line
    now she’s an old woman thick and earthy

    by tomorrow she hopes to leap
    out of this skin and into a new one
    a skin like petals like leaves

    The poems deal with ultimate questions. What is time? What is memory? Is it invented or real? Is death a kind of dream? Is life? Is God a man, a woman, or a Sacred Reptile? The imaginative leaps in When Earth Leaps Up are as easy as looking up at the prairie sky, as simple as turning your head to the side to catch a glimpse of an idea as it skips past you in the form of an interesting stranger, a passing cloud, the face of a loved one, long dead.

    Mark Abley is the editor or author of 10 books, including the internationally acclaimed Spoken Here: Travels Among Threatened Languages. Abley is the literary executor for Anne Szumigalski.

    Subject(s): Canadian poetry
    Original Publisher: London, Brick Books
    Language(s): English
    Collection(s)/Series: Brick Books Poetry