Fulfilling my obligations to my long-neglected TBR one book a time. Want to know why? I explain it in the first post here. Posting striking lines daily on BlueSky

Back after a little bit of an early summer break and diving in with a fantastic book. I honestly don’t remember when this book snuck into the house and hid itself in the TBR pile. Sometime after 2006 which is when this second printing was published. And that was seven years after Anne’s passing from cancer.

If you have taken a poetry class at pretty much any Canadian university you more than likely are at least familiar with Anne’s name, of not her work. If you haven’t read any of her work, either at all or since that undergrad course, consider this a sign from the universe that it is time for you to track this, or any other, volume down.

You should know going in that while you may be tempted to judge the poems by their titles (‘The Winter Cat,’ or ‘Mother and Daughter Dancing in a Garden’) as prairie domestics, do not be hasty. More than most poets you know, Anne is dangerous. She has what Hilary Clark describes in her introduction to this book as “…double vision, a vision at once physical and metaphysical.”

There is a hook to her writing, a hook and eye, to misquote a Margaret Atwood poem “a fishhook, an open eye.” A double hook, piercing coming and going. These poems raise their hands then let them drop again and a veil is parted, scales fall, the signified leaps out from behind the signifier and says boo!

If you follow me over on BlueSky, you already know I post lines I find striking every day as I slowly read through one book or issue each week. Here a couple of stanzas from the untitled poem which also names the book:

when earth leaps up
and heaven descends
and the two meet like lovers
then the question is
could these flowers be stars

and is dust nothing
more than the handful
I sprinkled on your face
as you went down into the dirt

This is what is driving my creativity this week.