POETRY & OTHER WORDS
Poetry
I was the only one who could stop
myself, loving. I was rolling
along and growing old
as I've told you so many times
before I was shrinking inside
my skin, so transparent
with want that I pulled shut
the window, I was a glass
wall. That was me, my lips
mashed grotesque against the triple
pane, that was my breath
obliterating the view.
I was stretched. I was poisoned.
And then I forgave myself.
No. That's not entirely true
I was given permission to step through
the fear and ceaseless chatter and call out
in a voice I'd never used before
to breathe deep and walk freely
whatever place on earth I choose
to set my foot. Permission to know
my skin the way the apple does
coming into fullness at the end
of the season. Now I can tell you
about the sweetness under the sun
declare the ripe round truth
that I'm beginning to speak with tenderness
I'm learning to close with love.
Excerpt from: Canadian Creative Arts in Health, Training and Education (CCAHTE) eNews/journal CCAHTE
Time
Out of Mind
by Laurie Block
Oolichan Books, Lantzville, BC, 2006
ISBN 0-88982-225-5
120 pages $17.95 pb
In
the foreword to this moving, honest and luminous collection of poems,
Laurie Block inscribes the last coherent words his mother said to him:
I used to be quite fond of you. Shortly after that, she lost what remained
of her senses and sank into the vegetative state in which she spent her
last years. Lights Out, the first section of Time Out of Mind, is the
poet’s journey into a darkness that is only in part his mother’s.
He writes to touch the borders of consciousness and emerges with a map
of the mind and body in extremis. Many of these poems are rooted in disorientation,
displacement and loss of equilibrium, the friction between what happens
outside the skin and what may be taking place on the inside. The poet
believes that we value consciousness as somehow more concrete, enduring
and linked to assumptions about identity than our bodies. He therefore
asks the question: Is the self first a face or a soul?
In the middle section, We Chemists of Grief, the poems address those who have come through the darkness to die and grieve well. These poems reveal the truth that healing is possible even in the absence of a cure. In moving beyond fear, anger, regret and disassociation fall away. It becomes possible to live and die in peace, fully alive and present to what each day might bring, to what had been and is no more.
The poems in the final section, Coming to my Senses, are offered as a celebration of living and dying and the naming of desire. In describing them, Block says: “I’m not ashamed of the naked romanticism, the disposition to gratitude and hope, even in the absence of a guarantee. No more will I hesitate to ask for what I want or give what I can. To ache for this earth and all that inhabit it, for the love that makes sense of living and makes room for death; for the words that bring comfort and the memories that give heat and light.”
Laurie Block is a poet, playwright and storyteller. He was born in Winnipeg and now lives in Brandon, Manitoba. His previous work includes a chapbook of poetry, Governing Bodies, and a bilingual collection of poems, Foreign Graces/Bendiciones Ajenas, based on his experiences in South America. He is also the author of a full-length play, The Tomato King, produced by Theatre Projects of Manitoba in 1997, and a short piece, Pop! His short story, While the Librarian Sleeps, won the 2003 Prairie Fire fiction contest and, most recently, The National Magazine Award Gold Medal for fiction.For more information, contact:
Hiro Boga, Oolichan Books |
Sales representation by Kate Walker & Co. Distribution by University of Toronto Press |
Oolichan Books is grateful for the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Book Publishing Industry Development Programme and the British Columbia Arts Council.
Read an
excerpt from Time Out of Mind.
This book may be purchased through the following bookstores and
publishers:
Online through McNally Robinson.
Online through Chapters / Indigo
Pennywise Books
1031 Rosser Avenue
Brandon Manitoba
(204) 728-2265
Foreign
Graces
Bendiciones Ajenas
by Laurie Block
The Muses' Co., Winnipeg, 1999
ISBN 1-896239-48-X
96 pp.
$12.95 paper.
When Canadian writer Laurie Block traveled to Chile, he found himself living his life in translation. Speaking, working, and forging new friendships entirely in Spanish, Block found that the new language altered his imaginative vision. As he began to compose poetry in Spanish, he developed his belief that all human language is like "a hand stretched out / to the fallen body." All poetry is "a name for what can’t be grasped."
Completely original in its concept, Foreign Graces presents poems first conceived in the poet’s second language. This book explores the gaps and the risks, the moments of collision and the moments of epiphany, that occur when language barriers are broken.
Poetry, Robert Frost once said, is what gets lost in translation. But in Foreign Graces, the different languages inform each other and enrich the readers’ experience of the poems. Block explores the rough edges where two cultures meet with compelling humility and a strong faith in the power of human communication.
"I believe that words are knotted sheets
on the roof of a burning hotel. I accept
the possibility of rescue…"
Read an excerpt from Foreign Graces Bendiciones Ajenas.
This book may be purchased through the following bookstores and publishers:
Online through Chapters / Indigo
Other Words
WHILE THE LIBRARIAN SLEEPS
Prairie Fire wins gold, Winnipeg Free Press, Wednesday June 15, 2005. Winnipegger turned Brandonite Laurie Block received a gold medal at the National Magazine Awards in Toronto last week for his short story While the Librarian Sleeps, which was published in the Winnipeg literary quarterly Prairie Fire.
Winner of the 2003 Prairie Fire Fiction Contest and the 2004 National Magazine Gold medal for fiction.
Excerpt from While the Librarian Sleeps:
In exchange we provided free labour six days a week, Sunday set aside for contemplation, prayer and, if conceivable, second helpings of cloud. Autumn gave way to winter, and as the rains, the one, true, continuous and Catholic rain, settled in for good with her shabby suitcase and bursting pockets, we gathered wood, repaired fences, piled rocks and befriended our cousin’s livestock. Hands down we preferred the muddy fields to the house, where we walked softly, spoke not at all and slept on a straw mattress in the attic. Although the rain fell night and day, it was the driest place on earth, so dry we could hear the rats gnawing through our nightmares. Outside there was room for words, for eloquent tears and muted confidences. It was possible to imitate the wet woolly tranquillity of the beasts as they rubbed against the fenceposts, relieving themselves of parasites. Only the fact we were so skinny saved us. All skin and bones and heartache, we were too insubstantial to sink into the sucking mud or dissolve in the downpour.
Seasons passed, I’m not sure how many, but every one saturated with sorrow, cemented in cloud. Maybe that’s not strictly true, perhaps that’s just what a child imagines under the full weight of her helplessness. Today I know better, it couldn’t possibly have rained all the time.