Sign-In
Cart
Alterations
Paperback
ISBN13: 9780921833970
Publisher: Signature Editions
Published: Oct 1 2004
Pages: 96
Weight: 0.34
Height: 0.30 Width: 6.08 Depth: 8.94
Language: English
Alterations is a book of arrival at beginnings. When George Payerle finally escaped city life, he returned to the coast into which he had been born when Vancouver was a much smaller town -- a coast where the mountains fall into the sea as waves of rainforest. This is a coast of shadow weather amongst cedars and fir, where the light of everyday is a Turner painting, a land/seascape suffused with the spirit made visible.
In these poems the old coast of logging and fishing is all but extinct, inhabited by ghosts of men with peaveys in their hands and bulldozers in their eyes. Ghosts with the power to inform us, like the rusted logskidder's arch standing by the highway as though it were a dinosaur's hipbones.
Alterations continues the musical meditations of Payerle's Last Trip to Oregon, which memorialized the death of his friend, the poet Charles Lillard. The music has moved towards Bach's cello suites and Jan Garbarek's loon-like saxophone. The serenity achieved through mourning the death of a friend has moved into transcendent contemplation of the diurnal and the extraordinary -- garbage day, George W's baleful face, Vancouver Island rising like a tsunami in the west, the return of a prodigal daughter -- transcendent but never without pain, or death -- language many-jewelled as the fangs of these wolves herding prey toward consummation, and tender yet as ewes with lamb.
Also in
General Poetry
Dante's Vita Nuova, New Edition: A Translation and an Essay
Pitavy, Francois
Alighieri, Dante
Paperback
Autobiography of Red: A Novel in Verse (by the Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature)
Carson, Anne
Paperback
The Beauty of the Husband: A Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos (by the Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature)
Carson, Anne
Paperback
Decreation: Poetry, Essays, Opera (by the Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature)
Carson, Anne
Paperback
Sounding the Seasons Enlarged Edition: One Hundred and Ten Sonnets for the Christian Year
Guite, Malcolm
Paperback
Lao Tzu: Tao Te Ching: A Book about the Way and the Power of the Way
Le Guin, Ursula K.
Lao Tzu
Paperback
A Bowl of Goodness: Nourishing Poems with a Side of Soup, Celebrating Community, Friendship, and Resilience
Jackson, Major
Hardcover
Ariel: The Restored Edition: A Facsimile of Plath's Manuscript, Reinstating Her Original Selection and Arrangement
Plath, Sylvia
Paperback