Susan Briscoe Reading

Our very own Susan Briscoe will be reading this Sunday at 9pm at The Sparrow (5322 Boulevard St.Laurent), along with Antony Di Nardo, Jacob McArthur Mooney and Richard Van Camp.

Don Coles Reax

I sometimes feel one of my most important jobs as an editor is to lower expectations. This is especially true with regards to reviews, which have all but evaporated for poetry books. When I started writing in the late nineties, a collection of joe-ordinary poetry could expect to get at least 5-6 reviews across the country in the dailies and lit mags. Today even one review is enough to cause a publicist to run around the office dousing themselves in champagne. But sometimes a book breaks through and reminds you (almost) of the good old days. Where We Might Have Been, Don Coles' tenth book of poetry, is one of those books. Review-wise, the collection has put up some decent numbers since it was published last October. Roundup below

"It is difficult to think of another poet whose style is so unmannered, whose tone is so engagingly true." Kenneth Sherman, The Globe and Mail.

"The climax of a singular reign as one of this country’s major lyricist." Jacob McArthur Mooney, Quill & Quire

"A restrained reflection on living...heart-piercing." Amanda Jernigan, Arc Magazine (unavailable online).

"A limitless range...a body of poetry that is highly personal but that also keeps a distance from the self." Alex Good, goodreports.net

"a powerfully hypnotic memory-weave of doubt and universal revelation." Brian Palmu

"The epitome of good ideas well executed"

I know, it's been yonkers since the last posting. But with a major project finally tucked into bed, I'm hoping to get back to my semi-regular pace. To start myself off, here's a great interview with the man who turns out our brilliant covers, David Drummond.

My wife works as a horse groom for a big show barn and gets up at 5:00 in the morning to get ready for work. Consequently I start my day around the same time. It’s funny — I live in farm country and basically keep farmer’s hours. The lights are also on in the neighbouring barns when I start my day.

Marcel Trudel Dies at 93

The great Harvard-trained historian, Marcel Trudel, passed away on January 11 at the age of 93. He influenced a generation of Quebec historians. He strove for intellectual freedom, first scandalizing the French-Canadian religious and academic establishment in 1945 with a ground-breaking book on Voltaire. In 1960, he shocked readers when his book, Deux siècles d'esclavage au Québec, revealed the prevalence of slavery in New France. His uncompromising research earned him much criticism as he fearlessly demolished the mythic versions of New France's heroes (i.e. Dollard-des-Ormeaux).

In 2002 Véhicule Press published Memoirs of a Less Travelled Road: A Historian's Life, translated by Jane Brierley, which won the Governor General's Award for Translation. In fall 2011 the press will be publishing the first English translation of Deux siècles d'esclavage au Québec by George Tombs.

Canadian Poetry Rebooted

It's finally here. Very happy to announce the Montreal launch of the controversial new anthology, Modern Canadian Poets, edited by Evan Jones and Todd Swift.

The evening will include readings by Evan Jones, Norm Sibum, Robyn Sarah, Anne Compton, Mary Dalton and David McGimpsey.

As anthologies go, this one is a big deal -- the first international one devoted to Canadian poetry in a half a century. Drop by and see what all the fuss is about.

Thursday January 13th 2011 from 7pm

Librairie Drawn & Quarterly

211 Bernard Ouest

Order of Canada

I'm delighted to announce that Christopher Wiseman -- author of 36 Cornelian Avenue, published in 2008 by Signal Editions -- has been named to the Order of Canada "For his contributions to the development of creative writing as a poet and professor." What a wonderful way to ring in the new year. (In fine western-Canadian newspaper fashion, the Herald chose to run this item in the Sports section.)

Books of the Year

After providing year-end recommendations for 2008 and 2009, I thought I'd try something different this time. I asked some Signal poets (present and future) for books they enjoyed in the last twelve months. Here's what I got back.

Mark Callanan

I don’t know if I’d call it the “best” book of the year, and it wasn’t actually published in 2010 (so I’m delinquent on two accounts), but Luke Kennard’s The Harbour Beyond the Movie (Salt) is something that caught my attention earlier this year. I’d read his poem “The Murderer” in a Forward anthology a couple of years back and was blown away by it (Mob-style execution, multiple Tommy guns—think Sonny Corleone’s toll bridge death scene). It was one of those poems that confounds and delights, that makes one think: Oh, you can do that with poetry? Who knew? The whole collection, in fact, is exhilarating and disorienting, proceeding as it does by surreal narratives, like fun-house mirrors that make the familiar foreign, and in so doing, underline the modern world's many absurdities.

Mary Dalton

This year has been such that I've fallen a bit behind in reading the books of the year--am catching up on some of last year's, indeed. One that I thought highly of from 2009 is John Glenday's Grain (Picador) Daryl Hine's serial poem & (Fitzhenry & Whiteside) comes to mind among this year's books.

Susan Glickman

Steven Heighton's Patient Frame (Anansi) is a formally elegant and morally resonant book, ranging in topics from the political to the domestic. The collection includes tributes to those who resisted evil, such as Warrant Officer Hugh Thompson, who stopped the My Lai massacre "as if to save was also labour/ for male arms", as well as to

The small-scale makers of precious obscurios—pomegranate spoons, conductors' batons, harpsichord tuning hammers, War of 1812 re-enactors' ramrods, hand-cranks for hurdy-gurdies.

It excoriates a child-molesting choir-master

who–while earth slowly unstrings a boy

in his lento measure of staved ground—

still savours the tang

of August tomatoes, chords of Fauré’s Requiem

(two years served, in fairway minimum)

and the rectifying esteem of upstanding Ang-

lican pals.

as well as pondering how and when one stops reading bedtime stories to one’s child:

How does the end enter? There's a hinging

like a book's sewn spine in the raw matter

of time—that coded text, illegible—

and stretched too far, it goes.

As these examples suggest, the book is full of those frissons of recognition that make reading poetry a way of reintroducing one to one's own soul.

Richard Greene

I'll plunk for Derek Walcott's White Egrets (FSG). Long line, large rhetoric, he takes the kind of risks that terrify Canadian poets. The form honours the largeness of an impassioned life. He grieves, he regrets, he returns from exile, he prepares to die, and he turns it all to music.

Jason Guriel

Bloom (Anansi) by Michael Lista is a first book of poetry that will give its creator no cause to wince in the years to come, and ought to put the rest of the literary world on notice. It isn’t juvenilia or, worse, promising. Instead, like Joyce’s Ulysses and Lennon and McCartney’s “A Day in the Life,” Lista’s assured book speaks fluently in various tongues as it takes the measure of an apocalyptic final day in one's scientist's quiet life.

Jason Guriel

I’ve been reading Christian Wiman’s third collection, Every Riven Thing (FSG), for a few years now, which is to say I’ve made sure to keep up with the magazines smart enough to publish its excerpts. Wiman writes instant classics that speak for themselves, speak about grief and God, and all but demand to be quoted: poems in which a tree “seems cast / in the form of a blast / that would have killed it,” and “leaves shush themselves like an audience,” and “wind seeks and sings every wound in the wood.”