Catalog Search Results
Author
Language
English
Appears on list
Description
"It is not wise to waste the life / Against a stubborn will. / Yet would we die as some have done. / Beating a way for the rising sun wrote Arna Bontemps. In The Day-Breakers, poet Michael Fraser imagines the swords raised and lives lost by the thousands of Black soldiers who fought for the Union during the American Civil War of whom hundreds were Canadian, fighting for the freedom of their African Brethren. Commemorating the dismal treatment they...
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
"Mike Barnes' Braille Rainbow is about perception across the sensory spectrum and the arc of learning about the world and about oneself. These poems, organized in four sections, engage first with infant appetites, others, and social justice, before turning inward to traverse the perilous heights and depths of the mind, drawing on Barnes' own experience of mental illness and his years of caring for his mother in her dementia. The latter half of the...
Author
Language
English
Description
Spanning forty years and ten previously published collections, Wherever We Mean to Be is the first substantial selection of Robyn Sarah's poems since 1992. Chosen by the author, the 97 poems in this new volume highlight the versatility of a poet who moves easily between free verse, traditional forms, and prose poems. Familiar favorites are here, along with lesser-known poems that collectively round out a retrospective of the themes and concerns that...
Author
Language
English
Description
David Hickey's second collection builds upon the myriad strengths of his first. In a specimen book of songs, stories, and covenants, Hickey's subjects range from art and astronomy to snowflakes and suburbia. These poems "take their time / Covering the roadside trees in forms of their careful willing . . . gesturing down to earth, unveiling new shapes / for all that they find."
Author
Language
English
Description
The least important man was a boy in the 1970s. He remembers clubhouses, plastic soldiers, swimming lessons, rocket launches, a grandfather's letters from World War I. Those days are long gone, however: now the least important man is grown up. He lives in the city. He suffers endless rush hours, he dreams of other places, he drinks cheap coffee and crosses streets and sees explosions on the TV news. But through it all he's still thinking about that...
Author
Language
English
Description
A BOSTON GLOBE BEST POETRY BOOK OF 2011The poems in this collection inhabit several countries or no country at all, but many are concerned with boundaries: between words and silence, one person and another, today and tomorrow, freedom and fear. Although the poems rarely employ traditional forms of rhyme and repetition, their sound is the engine that propels them, while invented visual shapes intensify the experience of reading. All of these experiments...
7) The Analyst
Author
Language
English
Description
In her latest collection Molly Peacock, one of Canada's most beloved poets, tells the story of her longtime psychoanalyst who returned to painting after surviving a stroke. By translating techniques of visual art into language, The Analyst guides us through breathtaking settings and portraiture, searching for authenticity behind tapestries of illusion.
8) Sum
Author
Language
English
Description
Nimbly slipping between personae, masks, and moods, the prosody-driven poems of Sum weigh the volatility and mutability of the self against the forces of habit, instinct, and urge. With homages to Hopkins, Graves, Wislawa Szymborska, Paul Muldoon, and more, and in allusion-dappled, playfully sprung stanzas, this third book from poet and critic Zachariah Wells both wears its influences openly and spins a sound texture all its own, in a collection far...
9) Groundwork
Author
Language
English
Description
The three sequences of Groundwork comprise a sophisticated reworking of European myth on the order of Yeats's The Tower. The first is situated by an archaeological dig in modern-day Tunisia, the second by the Garden of Eden, the third by the waters and islands of Homer's Odyssey. Together they form a devastating critique of contemporary aesthetics. Few poets today are versed in the archetypes that inform the European tradition, and even fewer can...
Author
Publisher
Biblioasis
Language
English
Description
In the eighteenth century, on discovering her husband has been murdered, an Irish noblewoman drinks handfuls of his blood and composes an extraordinary lament that reaches across centuries to the young Doireann Ní Ghríofa, whose fascination with it is later rekindled when she narrowly avoids fatal tragedy in her own life and becomes obsessed with learning everything she can about the poem Peter Levi has famously called "the greatest poem written...
12) Metanoia
Author
Language
English
Description
T. S. Eliot and Tennessee Ernie Ford, Buddha and Jesus, Jung and Heidegger. Love, solitude, obliteration, the ocean, and a sad neighbor who feeds pigeons. Metanoia is an aphoristically narrative poem that engages all of these, a book-length meditation on transformation, enlightenment, and on opening one's eyes. McCartney's work evinces that journey, the junket into the self. Sharon McCartney is the author of numerous poetry books. She has an MFA from...
Author
Language
English
Description
Painters use the term "fugitive pigments" to describe those colours most prone to fading after a brief exposure to light. In Self-Portrait Without a Bicycle, poet and visual artist Jessica Hiemstra uses the idea of fugitive colour to explore the grieving process; whether her subject is a lost grandparent, language, child, painting or cat, Hiemstra renders the fleetingness of life with fine, delicate strokes.
14) The Debt
Author
Language
English
Description
In the tradition of Williams' Paterson, The Debt explores tensions between tradition and innovation, present and past, in St. John's, Newfoundland. An argument for community in an increasingly isolated age, The Debt takes stock of all the dues we owe: to nature, to our ancestors, to one another and ourselves.
Author
Language
English
Description
The first substantial selection of award-winning poet Robyn Sarah's poems in twenty-five years, Wherever We Mean to Be spans her entire forty year career. Warm, direct, and intimate, accessible even at their most enigmatic, and seemingly effortless in their musicality, her poems are a meditation on the passage of time, transience and mortality.
16) Sub Divo
Author
Language
English
Description
Mwanito was eleven when he saw a woman for the first time, and the sight so surprised him he burst into tears. Mwanito has been living in a former big-game park for eight years. The only people he knows are his father, his brother, an uncle, and a servant. He's been told that the rest of the world is dead, that all roads are sad, that they wait for an apology from God. In the place his father calls Jezoosalem, Mwanito has been told that crying and...
17) Love Poems
Author
Language
English
Description
Available for the first time as a complete selection in English, Love Poems presents Jaime Sabines' powerful erotic verse in an exceptional translation by Irish Canadian poet Colin Carberry. Jaime Sabines, Mexico's most influential modern poet, was born in Chiapas in 1926. He received numerous literary awards and honors over the course of his career. Sabines died in Mexico City in 1999.
Author
Language
English
Description
In her second book, Alexandra Oliver takes us on a journey of escape from the suburbs of Canada to Glasgow, Scotland. Training her eye on the locals-on the streets, by rivers, in museums, on playgrounds, in their own homes, in the ill-starred town of Lockerbie-Oliver reflects on issues of exile, memory and identity, while traveling back into her own past.
19) Octopus
Author
Language
English
Description
As apt to channel the confessionalism of Anne Sexton as the red-in-tooth-and-claw nature poetry of Ted Hughes, Patrick Warner's voice ranges freely from the colloquial to the baroque. Over the past fifteen years, by harboring and honoring such fraught tensions. In Octopus we have him at his best.
Author
Language
English
Description
David Starkey's A Few Things You Should Know About the Weasel is a far-ranging and fearless collection, of great humour, intelligence and sympathy. Ranging through philosophy, art and history -- both global and domestic -- these poems skillfully chronicle the darkness that is our current age and condition, and the pinpricks of light thta may show us the way out.
In Interlibrary Loan
Didn't find what you need? Items not owned by Penticton Public Library can be requested from other Interlibrary Loan libraries to be delivered to your local library for pickup. Items must be over 1 year old.
Didn't find it?
Can't find what you are looking for? Try our Materials Request Service for new books published this year. Submit Request