Showing posts with label Andrew Burke. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Andrew Burke. Show all posts
Saturday, May 25, 2013
some author activity: Maguire, Earl, Graham, Abel, mclennan + McFadden,
Shannon Maguire answers some questions over at Open Book: Toronto; Amanda Earl discusses the narrative in poetry; Lea Graham discusses place in poetry over at the Atticus Review, introducing readers to the work of poets Michael Anania and Joseph Harrington; Jordan Abel has started blogging for The Capilano Review; rob mclennan has a new poem up at The Wonder Book, as selected by guest-editor Andrew Burke; and Griffin-nominee David W. McFadden graces the dusie Tuesday poem series with "three dubious sonnets."
Saturday, January 12, 2013
Mark Frutkin reviews Clarke, Brockwell, Burke+Hall and Kroetsch over at the ottawa poetry newsletter,
Ottawa writer Mark Frutkin was good enough to review four recent above/ground press titles over at the ottawa poetry newsletter [see the original post here]. Thanks!
Review of Four Chapbooks from above/ground press
by Mark Frutkin
Selected Canticles by George Elliott Clarke
The Crawdad Cantos (Excerpts from Impossible Books) by Stephen Brockwell
Shikibu Shuffle by Andrew Burke and Phil Hall
Further to Our Conversation – Poems by Robert Kroetsch
A chapbook is by necessity a diminutive taste of poetry. A morsel of a poet’s work – a good introduction to someone you have not previously read or perhaps a reacqaintance, a revisiting with old friends.
I would consider George Elliott Clarke in the ‘old friend’ category, not literally but in the sense that I’ve read much of his poetry over the years (almost all of it, I think) and reviewed previous collections here and there (See http://markfrutkin.blogspot.ca/2011/08/book-review-17-blue-by-george-elliott.html). I would rank his book, Whylah Falls, in my list of top five Canadian collections of poetry, all-time. No other Canadian poet is so lavish with sensual detail and so bold about the physical world and the human body. And in Selected Canticles he delivers again, as he always does, giving us a marvelous slumgullion of a miniature feast, like a serving of appetizers so rich you don’t need to eat the impending meal.
Of course, Clarke always goes for the ear as well as the eye: “not even the squeal of a squall / as waves whacked rock,” or “blossoms blaze a branch.” And he can be humorous too. In ‘À Cristophe Colombe,’ he calls the Spain of Columbus’ day, “a comic-opera Empire”. One can almost picture a Gilbert and Sullivan musical based on Queen Isabella and her famous explorer.
Of course, no one in Canada comes anywhere near Clarke’s ability to write frankly about sex – raw, graphic and straight-up as home-distilled whiskey. He doesn’t scruple to use the good old Anglo-Saxon sex words: fuck, cunt and anus appear liberally throughout these poems, several of which address the black man’s role as hard-driving lover of white women. In a sense, this becomes a trope of the payback for or escape from slavery. Clarke is always conscious of the black man’s position in our world and in history but these poems are not the least bit didactic. They’re the real thing.
No one joins poetry and science as fluidly as Stephen Brockwell. The Crawdad Cantos contains what has become one of my favourite Canadian poems. ‘A Primer for Drainage’ is from The Evangelical Handbook for Engineers, a wonderful conceit to pull together the world of the spirit and the material world of the engineer, builder, scientist. You could be an atheist and still delight in his take on God as inherent in platinum-iridium bars and krypton-86 emissions. The last few lines are so striking, I must quote them in full: “Among time and distances, he is the absolute constant, / the being that lets being be – and every culvert, / aqueduct, conduit, sluice, grate, trench and duct / merely drains the ephemeral projection of his eternal tears.” I think including the word ‘duct’ in that list is a sure sign of poetic brilliance as it resonates with the last word of the poem, ‘tears’.
There are other excellent poems here, especially ‘Parrots not in Cleveland’ (from Cantos of the 1%). Besides the fact that Cleveland, my birthplace, hardly ever appears in a Canadian poem, this poem has a humorous tone that I very much appreciate. Drinking banana daiquiris in Cleveland in March is odd enough as the subject for a poem but the poet also says he can imitate a parrot’s voice: “I’ll need a trumpet, / a trunk full of Hawaiian shirts, a pair / of holey sneakers spattered with blue paint, / a month of sunlight to give this snow the shaft”. ‘Sunlight’ and ‘shaft’ – once again, a brilliant juxtaposition that plays on the two definitions for ‘shaft’. And again, this poem ends with a striking image. But I urge you to pick up this chapbook to learn what it is.
In Shikibu Shuffle, two poets, Andrew Burke from Australia and Phil Hall from Perth, (who won the Governor General’s Award for Poetry for his fascinating book, Killdeer) have collaborated to produce a collection of fifteen poems based on the five-line form used by the Japanese poet, Murasaki Shikibu (973-1014). Each poem here is ten lines long (with a few variations). It’s difficult, if not impossible, to determine who wrote what, and exactly how the process worked. In any case, the result is a kind of medieval Japanese jazz with a flowing series of riffs that sometimes connect and sometimes don’t. The musical play here reminds me somewhat of Jack Kerouac’s Mexico City Blues (which was influenced more by hardcore jazz than what we now consider the blues). There’s a vibrancy and freedom to the images and their links here, in this back and forth ‘shuffle’, and sometimes the results are striking: “a Chinese dragon of smoke / wearing my dead friend’s clothes / above the marina” or “pale cuticle” (for the moon), or the exceedingly strange and suggestive “to weave submerged antlers / breathing blue at their tips”. This is a collection that can be read more than twice.
The very fine poet (and novelist), Robert Kroetsch, died in 2011. This small chapbook, Further to Our Conversation, consists of three letter-poems to friends, interspersed with three very short poems. The first letter-poem, ‘Dear John Lent’, reveals the wonderful line, “Our first cry is a poem that contains everything” and the intriguing phrase “Icarus in a car...” These actually do feel like thoughts that came to Kroetsch after a late-night conversation with a friend, a kind of soliloquy inspired by a dialogue. Kroetsch’s poetry was always wonderfully experimental and refused to hew to the straight and narrow furrows that characterize much of mainstream Canadian verse. I see him running his plough in all sorts of mad geometries across those prairie fields: ovals within ovals, spirals, secret divinatory crop circles of poetry. His sense of the comic is excellent: “Punctuation is a middle-class pretension. So is a toothache. In heaven you have to sit eternally staring at a bright light, so be sure to take your dark glasses.” (‘Dear Jeff Carpenter’) He ends the same poem with the wonderful lines: “I once travelled halfway across Spain to see St Teresa’s bent left elbow safe in a glass jar. We each write poems as we see fit. But then, what poem isn’t a relic?” (It makes me want to ask if St Teresa wrote left-handed!)
Another line in ‘Dear Jeff Carpenter’ makes light of the inevitable, and probably tells us much about what kind of person and poet Robert Kroetsch was. In four words that embody a kind of simplicity, acceptance and peace, he writes: “Death, that necessary pest.”
Sunday, November 4, 2012
some author activity: Poe, McKinnon, Anstee, Pirie, Brockwell, Maguire, Stewart, Butler, Barbour, macLean + Burke
Deborah Poe [who took the above photo, by the by] has some new work in the fifth issue of seventeen seconds: a journal of poetry and poetics; Barry McKinnon does as well, with his lecture from the 2nd annual VERSeFest Poetry Festival; a new series of lectures will be presented at a VERSeFest fundraiser on November 15th in Ottawa, by Cameron Anstee, Pearl Pirie and Stephen Brockwell, hosted by The Factory Reading Series; Shannon Maguire reads in Toronto on November 7 with Melannie Gayle and Katie Jordan to help Sarah Pinder launch her new Coach House Books poetry collection (you should totally go); and various authors from moons back, including Christine Stewart and Jenna Butler were part of Douglas Barbour's month-long TRUCK (they all had above/ground press chapbooks in the "Alberta Series," all of which appear online as free pdfs), as do kath macLean and Andrew Burke; and above/ground press makes the Tarpaulin Sky list of titles one can possibly review! (we choose to remain optimistic)
Tuesday, August 28, 2012
Pam Brown reviews Shikibu Shuffle, by Andrew Burke + Phil Hall
from Pam Brown's blog (see the original post here):
I recently received a box of an array of newly published pamphlets and chapbooks from Ottawa's above/ground press. One of them is a collaboration between the two well-known poets: Perth, Australia-based Andrew Burke and Perth, Canada-based Phil Hall. It's a really nice chapbook with a glued cover image (I think each cover is different), a bright orange fly leaf and a line drawing that resembles a rubber stamp, and could be a rubber stamp, on the title and end pages. There are fifteen short, minimal poems riffing on a tenth century Japanese poet. The suite is at once kind of dainty and perky. It's called Shikibu Shuffle.
The introductory page reads:
"Happy fate brought a poet from Perth Western Australia and a poet from Perth Ontario Canada together in 2009.
Then Andrew had a heart attack and was queued up for life-saving surgery.
With nothing to do but wait, kept alive by sprays and medical potions - to distract himself - Andrew agreed to work with Phil on a collaboration.
Andrew suggested the Japanese court poet Murasaki Shikibu (973-1014); her 5-line form might be a place to start.
Phil was thinking of Ornette Coleman: two quartets facing each other and going at it (1960).
We wrote in 5s back and forth, then shuffled our silence-inducing cacophony into 10s, then improvised from there...
Andrew's operation was bumped once, and then happened. He's fine.
The shuffle served its purpose, and now surprises and delights them both."
3.
I watch my chest
rise and fall in the mirror
nature in the raw
nothing I see or think
means anything to me
then I plan to tell you about it
and into each dull thunk
like lemon on fish
comes flugelhorn
a faint zing
11.
Talking to the air
I break cobwebs
on the line
cello kite fishing
making lurid
the net result
while hammock hook shines
sun holds motes float
I recently received a box of an array of newly published pamphlets and chapbooks from Ottawa's above/ground press. One of them is a collaboration between the two well-known poets: Perth, Australia-based Andrew Burke and Perth, Canada-based Phil Hall. It's a really nice chapbook with a glued cover image (I think each cover is different), a bright orange fly leaf and a line drawing that resembles a rubber stamp, and could be a rubber stamp, on the title and end pages. There are fifteen short, minimal poems riffing on a tenth century Japanese poet. The suite is at once kind of dainty and perky. It's called Shikibu Shuffle.
The introductory page reads:
"Happy fate brought a poet from Perth Western Australia and a poet from Perth Ontario Canada together in 2009.
Then Andrew had a heart attack and was queued up for life-saving surgery.
With nothing to do but wait, kept alive by sprays and medical potions - to distract himself - Andrew agreed to work with Phil on a collaboration.
Andrew suggested the Japanese court poet Murasaki Shikibu (973-1014); her 5-line form might be a place to start.
Phil was thinking of Ornette Coleman: two quartets facing each other and going at it (1960).
We wrote in 5s back and forth, then shuffled our silence-inducing cacophony into 10s, then improvised from there...
Andrew's operation was bumped once, and then happened. He's fine.
The shuffle served its purpose, and now surprises and delights them both."
3.
I watch my chest
rise and fall in the mirror
nature in the raw
nothing I see or think
means anything to me
then I plan to tell you about it
and into each dull thunk
like lemon on fish
comes flugelhorn
a faint zing
11.
Talking to the air
I break cobwebs
on the line
cello kite fishing
making lurid
the net result
while hammock hook shines
sun holds motes float
Saturday, April 14, 2012
Darryl Joel Berger reviews Phil Hall + Andrew Burke's Shikibu Shuffle
Labels:
Andrew Burke,
Darryl Joel Berger,
Phil Hall,
review
Wednesday, March 14, 2012
new from above/ground press: Shikibu Shuffle, a collaboration between Andrew Burke and Phil Hall
Shikibu Shuffle
Andrew Burke and Phil Hall
$4
published in Ottawa by above/ground press
March 2012
a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy
Andrew Burke was born in Victoria, but raised in Western Australia. Since the mid-Sixties, he has published nine collections of poetry. His most recent book of poems is QWERTY- take my word for it (Mulla Mulla Press, 2011). He has also published short stories, a novel, and criticism. He has lectured at universities in Australia and China. Readers may read his daily musings at http://hispirits.blogspot.com/
Phil Hall [see rob mclennan's lengthy essay on his work, here] is the 2011 winner of the Governor General's Award for Poetry in English for his book Killdeer (BookThug). Other recent titles are The Little Seamstress (Pedlar Press, 2010) and White Porcupine (Bookthug, 2007). He is a member of the Writers' Union of Canada. Everything escapes him.
To order, send cheques (add $1 for postage; outside Canada, add $2) to: rob mclennan, 402 McLeod St #3, Ottawa ON K2P 1A6 or paypal at www.robmclennan.blogspot.com
Andrew Burke and Phil Hall
$4
published in Ottawa by above/ground press
March 2012
a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy
Happy fate brought a poet from Perth Western Australia and a poet from Perth Ontario Canada together in 2009.
Then Andrew had a heart attack and was queued up for life-saving surgery.
With nothing to do but wait, kept alive by sprays and medical potions – to distract himself – Andrew agreed to work with Phil on a collaboration.
Andrew suggested the Japanese court poet Murasaki Shikibu (973 – 1014); her 5-line form might be a place to start.
Phil was thinking of Ornette Coleman: two quartets facing each other and going at it (1960).
We wrote in 5s back and forth, then shuffled our silence-inducing cacophony into 10s, then improvised from there...
Andrew's operation was bumped once, and then happened. He's fine.
The shuffle served its purpose, and now surprises and delights them both.
Andrew Burke was born in Victoria, but raised in Western Australia. Since the mid-Sixties, he has published nine collections of poetry. His most recent book of poems is QWERTY- take my word for it (Mulla Mulla Press, 2011). He has also published short stories, a novel, and criticism. He has lectured at universities in Australia and China. Readers may read his daily musings at http://hispirits.blogspot.com/
Phil Hall [see rob mclennan's lengthy essay on his work, here] is the 2011 winner of the Governor General's Award for Poetry in English for his book Killdeer (BookThug). Other recent titles are The Little Seamstress (Pedlar Press, 2010) and White Porcupine (Bookthug, 2007). He is a member of the Writers' Union of Canada. Everything escapes him.
To order, send cheques (add $1 for postage; outside Canada, add $2) to: rob mclennan, 402 McLeod St #3, Ottawa ON K2P 1A6 or paypal at www.robmclennan.blogspot.com
Labels:
Andrew Burke,
chapbook,
collaboration,
Phil Hall
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