Articles liés à What's Left

What's Left - Couverture souple

McLennan, Rob

 
9780889224988: What's Left

Synopsis

what's left, a book in six related sections, presents us with cues and clues to the poet's compositional strategies. The first section, "hazelnut," measures time as the unfolding life of space. It alludes to mclennan's long-term genealogy project, in which he discovers traces of the Sumerian flood, Etruscans, Icelanders, and Robert the Bruce hidden in "Indian Lands," waiting to be discovered like "gilded coffins in Egypt, undisturbed, as yet," along with other "'ancient' remains, now 'decades-old, '" of our more recent, cash-crop culture. This hopeful search for a unified thread of narrative continuity in our shared physical landscape is undermined by the road-poems of the book's second section, "interim report," where the poet finds himself "somewhere between love and madness," only to discover in the third section that the pursuit of a collective historical voice might well be merely a search for a little white li(n)e.

Section four, "cooley's key," shifts the identity/narrative search from the "other" to the "self," with an ironic platonic toss of the active body in favour of its passive intentions: "'he says in the old days, eh, all / they cared abt was sex & grades, eh, but now / all they care abt is grades ... where / has the ambition gone." Section five, "paisley," dead-ends in an artfully constructed fractal barrage of global nostalgia: a series of endlessly over- and under-stated images of idealized neighbourhoods where lawns are cut with mullets and relationships are cut into periodic tables by intrusive punctuation. Finally in section six, we find "what's left: coda," a return to the particulars of the poet's "territory" not a "mighty oak from a tiny acorn grown," but a hazelnut thicket in which a multiplicity of voices is heard.

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À propos de l'auteur

Born in Ottawa, Canada’s glorious capital city, rob mclennan currently lives in Ottawa, where he is home full-time with the two wee girls he shares with Christine McNair. The author of more than thirty trade books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction, he won the John Newlove Poetry Award in 2010, the Council for the Arts in Ottawa Mid-Career Award in 2014, and was longlisted for the CBC Poetry Prize in 2012 and 2017. In March, 2016, he was inducted into the VERSe Ottawa Hall of Honour. His most recent poetry titles include A halt, which is empty (Mansfield Press, 2019) and Life sentence, (Spuyten Duyvil, 2019). An editor and publisher, he runs above/ground press, seventeen seconds: a journal of poetry and poetics, Touch the Donkey, and the Ottawa poetry pdf annual ottawater. He is Interviews Editor at Queen Mob’s Teahouse, editor of my (small press) writing day, and an editor/managing editor of many gendered mothers. He spent the 2007-8 academic year in Edmonton as writer-in-residence at the University of Alberta, and regularly posts reviews, essays, interviews and other notices at robmclennan.blogspot.com.

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