Lookout - Softcover

Steffler, John

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0771082673 ISBN 13: 9780771082672

Publisher: McClelland & Stewart, 2010

Synopsis

The first collection of new poems in more than a decade from one of Canada’s most respected poets
 
The poems in John Steffler’s new collection are enlivened by the same muscular acts of attention that characterize his earlier books. As always, his poems inhabit experience fully, senses on high alert, transmitting the abundance and turbulence of physical existence; they are charged with the raw Eros of being. Nowhere is there a more complete nature poet: attuned, robust, honest, fully informal, and emotionally candid, brimming with energy and animal spirits. Many of the poems in Lookout explore and evoke specific landscapes: the limestone barrens of Newfoundland; the Blomidon and Lewis Hills; the Greek Islands. Others dwell on personal relationships: lover, pregnant daughter, and a touching, finely tuned sequence on a family coping with a mother’s Alzheimer’s. There is also a wonderful set of meditations on photographs from the archives in Newfoundland. Canadian literature is blessed – and animated – by John Steffler’s contributions to it.

About this title

About the Author:

John Steffler was the Parliamentary Poet Laureate of Canada from 2006 to 2008. His previous books of poetry include The Grey Islands, That Night We Were Ravenous, winner of the Atlantic Poetry Prize, and Helix: New and Selected Poems, winner of the Newfoundland and Labrador Poetry Prize. Steffler is also the author of the award-winning novel The Afterlife of George Cartwright.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

The Role of Calcium in Evolution
 
Sweet calcium we found we could live with,
stir into our cells’ hubbub, tinker into
a trellis to carry our fi erce red vine – its
eyeball blossoms, cunt orchids, cock orchids –
we could whittle it into bone stilts and paddles,
hooks, tongs, helmets, mallets, cleavers, awls,
fl utes, rasps, rattles, corsets, folding spokes,
but then, oh god the weight of all these
contraptions! Just throw them out and be
light! While the old hardware clatters
down like Victorian claw-foot settees
settling in scrap heaps – the ear trumpets,
the spurs compressed in archaeological
fi les – we fl oat careless as fruit fl ies
in an armoury, all the weight lifted,
tra-la! But the dark rock candy of history
dissolves in the rain, leaking the diatom’s binary
code, the lobster’s molecular gospel into
the water we drink. Sleepless we pore over
Things You Can Make with Calcium in cellular
Braille. As soon as you throw something away
you need the damn thing! Hinged pincers
down here somewhere under the catapults and
greaves. Tell me how else to deal with the world!

About this edition

• Publisher: McClelland & Stewart
• Publication date: 2010
• ISBN 10: 0771082673
• ISBN 13: 9780771082672
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 120