Peter Dale Scott's Murmur of the Stars is a work of extraordinary insight and charm, threaded through with the world vision of the diplomat and political activist?and with the more intimate, equally intense recognition of the humanist. Poet, professor, scholar, translator, traveller?Scott's rich and varied life experience is wondrously reflected in this collection of his poetry. Praise for previous books: "[Coming to Jakarta is] a work of great richness and complexity." - Thom Gunn, Times Literary Supplement "The wisdom that Scott achieves in [Listening to the Candle], and that he embodies in its flexible inclusive structure, is that we must search for a way between what he calls the 'brutality' of civilization and the mindless anarchy that he says will soon lead to brutality." - Daniel Morris, Harvard Review

Murmur of the stars: Selected shorter poems

SCOTT, PETER DALE

Signal Editions

<p>Collecting the works of 50 modern Canadian poets, this anthology of verse points to an emerging openness toward form in the nation's poetry. The book includes nearly 200 poems from more than 20 presses and an essay that describes and explains the innovations of form that distinguish the featured writers.<br></p>

The New Canon: An Anthology of Canadian Poetry

Literature & Fiction

Starnino, Carmine

Poetry

The poems in Christopher Patton's debut collection, Ox, are about seeing clearly, and also about relinquishing the need to see with specific intent. Through this tension they find their idiosyncratic magic. Like the 12th-century Buddhist parable of the ox-herder, Ox begins with a search, and its open-ended journey establishes the form of its religious and philosophical reach. Moving across lucently rendered North American landscapes, Patton catches a glimpse of his own spiritual setting, and in the process suggests a new direction, perhaps an entirely new scale, for Canadian nature poetry. Brimming with beautifully-controlled descriptions and startlingly precise word-play, Ox is an image of vulnerability before the world's plenitude. It is an astonishing achievement.Christopher Patton's poems have appeared in The Antioch Review, The Malahat Review, and The Fiddlehead, and were anthologized in The New Canon: An Anthology of Canadian Poetry. In 2000, he was awarded The Paris Review's Bernard F. Conners Prize for Poetry. Patton writes, and tends his apple trees, on Salt Spring Island.

Patton, Christopher

Sympathy for the Couriers is a collection of messages from the border region of our lives--that vast allegorized territory of cheap self-deceptions and illusions. By turns comical and grim, these new poems feature Peter Richardson at his most ventriloquistic. The "couriers" in question are the banged-up, long-suffering, Dantesque voices who, speaking through the poet, deliver their news: heartfelt, often heartbreaking admissions that, nonetheless, are always buoyant with aphoristic brio and panache. But the most important messenger here is Richardson himself, who having establishing a reputation as one Canada's best poets, has given us his most challenging book.

Sympathy for the Couriers

Peter Richardson

Vivid and powerfully descriptive, this collection of poems demonstrates a trained naturalist's eye, painting a sensuous and idiosyncratic portrait of the author’s rugged maritime landscape. Simultaneously staking out an emotional territory, this engrossing examination is layered with hard-edged textures and fiercely felt cadences. Combining selections from the author’s previous compendiums with new verse, this poetic exploration presents a unique blend of scientific detachment and empathetic range.

Animals of My Own Kind: New and Selected Poems

Thurston, Harry

Where We Might Have Been

Coles, Don

A hard-knuckled look at the other half, this collection of lively poems mix a girl-about-town cockiness with an all-too-rare emotional honesty about men, love, and relationships. Whether the subject is a one-man chimney demolition, the lifelong fidelity of seahorses, a lover at war in Afghanistan, or a kickboxing match, Lahey confronts the enduring disconnect between the sexes in a language that is slangy and quick, punctuated with jabs. She eyes those moments—in a day, in a life—when the normal clues we rely on disappear, shifting the line between domesticity and danger.

Spinning Side Kick (Signal Editions)

Lahey, Anita

History & Criticism

Largely written following a near-fatal medical emergency, this stirring collection of poetry offers the story of a young man whose gratitude at being alive is undercut by his own confusion and ambivalence. Brandishing a newly acute sense of mortality, the author emerges as a stroller of the Atlantic, stalked by terrifying sea legends, death-steeped domesticity, and the extinct Newfoundland wolf. Understated, sinister, and unsettling, this series of poems is an unforgettable offering from a budding master of the craft.

Gift Horse (Signal Editions)

Callanan, Mark

Pierre Nepveu is unique among French Quebec poets for having forged a voice at once unadorned, sensuous, and adventurous, and this new collection is a masterwork consisting of three sequences. The first focuses on an immigrant night cleaner glimpsed on a subway; the second, a riff on a group of stones on a table; and the final sequence concerns the poet’s parents and their deaths. The book closes with a long meditative poem written in the American southwest. In the original French, this collection was nominated for a Governor General’s Award for Poetry in 2010.

The Major Verbs

Nepveu, Pierre

The Scarborough

Lista, Michael

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