The Townhouse is very pleased to welcome local writer Janette Fecteau and nominees for the 2012 Atlantic Poetry Prize: Sue Goyette, Warren Heiti, and
Anne Simpson. The poets will read from their latest works this Saturday afternoon, and we expect a lively discussion to follow! See article in The Casket here.
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| Local writers Anne Simpson and Janette Fecteau. Photo credit: The Casket |
JANETTE FECTEAU lives in
Antigonish County, Nova Scotia, and teaches Fine Art at St Francis Xavier
University. Her poems have appeared in various journals, including most
recently Room (forthcoming), The
Dalhousie Review, Carousel, Our Times, Event, and The Antigonish Review. She is a graduate of UBC’s Optional-Residency
MFA program in Creative Writing, and winner of third prize for poetry in the
2009 Atlantic Writing Competition.
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2012 Atlantic Poetry Prize
Nominees
outskirts, Sue Goyette
Hydrologos, Warren Heiti
Is, Anne
Simpson
McClelland & Stewart
SUE GOYETTE lives in
Halifax, Nova Scotia and has published three books of poems, The True Names
of Birds, Undone and outskirts
(Brick Books) and a novel, Lures
(HarperCollins, 2002). Her fourth
collection of poems, Ocean, is
forthcoming from Gaspereau Press in 2013. She's been nominated for several
awards including the Governor General's Award for Poetry, the Pat Lowther
Award, the Gerald Lampert Award, the Thomas Head Raddall Atlantic Fiction Award
and won the 2008 CBC Literary Prize for Poetry, the 2010 Earle Birney Prize and
the 2011 Bliss Carman Award. Her poetry has appeared on the Toronto subway
system, in wedding vows and spray-painted on a sidewalk somewhere in St. John,
New Brunswick. Sue currently teaches in the Creative Writing Program at
Dalhousie University, is faculty for the Banff Wired Writing Studio and works
part-time at the Writers’ Federation of Nova Scotia.
Sue Goyette’s outskirts is a tour de force. Its originality lies in
Goyette’s refusal of despair, her conviction that the connections among people,
their conversation, curiosity, empathy and awe, can help us see a way forward.
Her aim is to find energy in human love, a way to walk the darkness rather than
hide from it. This book will name you, and frighten you; make you laugh, and
arm you for what is to come.
“One of the best poets writing today in
Canada, Susan Goyette proves herself at the height of her powers in outskirts. In these magnificent multi-part poems, she fuses
genealogical time with geological time and revels in paradoxes. Ranging from
the dynamics of families, to bad guests at dinner parties, to lovers and loved
ones, and on to deeply moving and terrifying images of erosion and clear
cutting, Goyette harnesses the expected to the absurd. As she creates synapses
from the personal to the global, Canada itself becomes a character with a
voice. With its zesty wordplay and its wrenching of the “eco” from the “logical,”
outskirts is both a book and a
reckoning. Goyette is candid, clairvoyant, and rescuing in her vision.” –
Molly Peacock
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WARREN HEITI currently
teaches in the Philosophy Department at Dalhousie University in Halifax. His
graduate studies were undertaken at the University of Victoria, BC, where he
was supported and influenced by Jan Zwicky, Tim Lilburn, Patrick Lane, Lorna
Crozier and Derk Wynand, among others.
Hydrologos is one long poem composed in five suites and a
coda, and spoken through masks. It is a poem about a specific passion, the one
that always follows love: sorrow. What happens to a human being under the
geologic pressure of this passion? — One calls out, and the world’s response is
silence. The work of sorrowing, one learns, is the work — the endless work — of
listening, by which the listener is changed. At the poem’s centre is the
original lyric elegy, the myth of Orpheus, but reimagined from the perspective
of Eurydike, who makes her own descent into the underworld, to rescue Death.
The poem spirals out from this centre, ranging widely across literary eras and
genres, engaging with ancient Greek mythtellers and philosophers; with Polish
painters and Russian filmmakers; with German Romantic and contemporary Canadian
poets.
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ANNE SIMPSON is the
author of three previous books of poetry: Light Falls Through You, winner of the Gerald Lampert Award and the
Atlantic Poetry Prize; Loop,
winner of the Griffin Poetry Prize; and Quick, winner of the Pat Lowther Award. She is the
author of two novels, Canterbury Beach and Falling,
longlisted for the Dublin IMPAC Literary Award and winner of the Dartmouth Book
Award for Fiction. She has also written essays on poetry and art – The
Marram Grass: Poetry and Otherness.
Simpson has worked as a Writer-in-Residence at universities
and libraries across the country, and she has been a faculty member at the
Banff Centre. She lives and works in Antigonish.
A cell is a world within
a world within a world. In this remarkable new collection, Anne Simpson finds
form and inspiration in the cell – as it divides and multiplies, expanding
beyond its borders. As these poems journey from the creation of the world
emerging out of chaos to the slow unravelling of a life that is revealed in a
poem that twists like a double helix, Simpson illuminates what it means to be
alive, here and now. Rich with the muscular craft, vibrant imagery, and exquisite
musicality for which her poetry is widely acclaimed, this collection sees
Simpson continuing to “negotiate an ever-changing path between language and
structure” (Vancouver Sun) –
with astonishing results. It is a work of great vision from one of our most
compelling poetic voices.
“With the experimentalism
of Anne Carson and the imagism of Anne Michaels, Anne Simpson explores the
globe of the heart.”
— Halifax Chronicle-Herald
“Anne Simpson's voice is
instantly recognizable. . . . [She writes] poems of extraordinary range,
intelligence and empathy.”
— Jury citation, Pat Lowther Memorial Award
“Simpson turns our
attention to the sharp edges of life, and she does it with language that
juxtaposes beauty with death, creating internal tension in the poems. Simpson
looks at death and loss with an unsentimental eye.”
— Canadian
Literature
