Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Take the Compass

Take the Compass

Hynes, Maureen

Paperback

Series: Hugh MacLennan Poetry

General Poetry

Currently unavailable to order

ISBN10: 0228018811
ISBN13: 9780228018810
Publisher: McGill-Queen's University Press
Published: Sep 15 2023
Pages: 104
Weight: 0.30
Height: 0.30 Width: 4.90 Depth: 7.40
Language: English

take the harp, take / the Fitbit and the Band-Aid box. Fold the whole / grey sheet of sky, lumpy and unalluring / into your rucksack.

A strong theme of journeys is threaded through Take the Compass. In a sense, every poem is itself a journey - into the past or the present, or toward what we hope and fear for the future. Poems can be journeys of repair and recovery, adventure and discovery. However, even in pandemic times when our journeying is curtailed, or at least confined, when we are abiding in one physical location with chafing and restiveness, we are still travelling. One of those journeys is discovering where language can take us.

Maureen Hynes's poems travel through cities and their outskirts to rivers, forests, and graveyards. They travel in time into the troubled present, across decades into early childhood, and into our perilous collective futures, seeking guides for these explorations. The title poem addresses the search for tools and instruments that will ward off adversity - tools to help us move forward to our chosen destinations. Take the Compass calls on art and nature as invisible helpers, and on uncountable things - personal values and traits such as courage - to break the bad news into nine living petals.

As with all her collections, Hynes shows a commitment to social justice, to acknowledging historical and contemporary inequities, to the search for sources of remedy, repair, and renewal, and to the sustaining power of love. The variety of poetic forms she has chosen lets this search carry the complexity and seriousness of its themes.

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