Xeclogue - Softcover

Robertson, Lisa

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0921586728 ISBN 13: 9780921586722

Publisher: New Star Books, 1999

Synopsis

Poetry. Poetics. This book is a reprint of the popular 1993 Tsunami title by the author of DEBBIE: AN EPIC. Part manifesto, part dramatic dialogue, part epistolary prose, XEclogue jams the categories of Woman and Nature, inventing necessary fantasies of history and place. [Robertson] slams open the shutters of these poems ... This is young, fresh work, full of startling assertions ... She's a brave and eloquent composer. -- Billy Little, Boo Magazine. I want to tell you about the hegemony of my supple extensions. My pliant starlets float like symptoms. They float in the indicative case, flinging accusations, insults, blasphemies and curses. They're cerebral and illegal . . . (Ecologue Five, Phantasie . . . Four p.m.)

About this title

About the Author

Lisa Robertson (born on July 22 1961) in Toronto is a Canadian poet who currently lives in Oakland. In 1979, she moved to British Columbia, where she remained for twenty-three years. During her time there, she was a member of The Kootenay School of Writing, which is a non-profit society that offers an alternative to the mainstream pedagogy of most Canadian universities. Although it is not necessarily acknowledged as much as her ties to The Kootenay School of Writing, she was integrally involved in Vancouver's art scene. Robertson is an honorary board member of Artspeak Gallery. She has written on and reviewed exhibitions and pieces by Kelly Wood, Robert Garcet, Liz Magor, Allyson Clay, Kathy Slade, and Hadley+Maxwell, among others. She has also written on architecture and sites in British Columbia, such as New Brighton Park and Value Village. Robertson contributed the "Beneath the Pavilions" column to Mix from 1997-1999. She co-edited the poetry journal Raddle Moon with Susan Clark in Vancouver, and has worked as an arts journalist, a book seller, a copy editor, an astrologer, a guest lecturer, and an essayist. She has written on the work of Robin Blaser, Denise Riley, Dionne Brand, Peter Culley, Ted Berrigan, John Clare, Lorine Niedecker, Pauline Reage, Michele Bernstein and Albertine Sarrazin. In 2006, she was a judge of the Griffin Poetry Prize and Holloway poet-in-residence at UC Berkeley. Currently she is artist-in-residence at California College of the Arts, in San Francisco

From Publishers Weekly

A Vancouver-based poet of pointed, controlled lyricism, Robertson has released two terrific books over the last decade with her home city's New Star books. Debbie: An Epic (1997) elliptically rendered its main character with a grand mix of tough talking, typographical experiment and sweet description. XEclogue was originally published in a limited edition in 1993, and appeared in its present, revised form in Canada last year. Divided into 10 ("X") abstractly named eclogues ("Honour," "Beauty," "Liberty," "Romance," "History," etc.), the book begins with the manfesto-like prologue, "How Pastoral," riffing on its chosen form: "I needed a genre for the times that I go phantom. I needed a genre to rampage Liberty, haunt the foul freedom of silence." The eclogues themselves proceed in a dialogic pastiche of archaic diction and current Newspeak, and are staged between "Lady M" (as in 18th-century poet Lady Mary Wortley Montagu) and "Nancy," who are gently menaced by a chorus of "Roaring Boys" loosely based on 4th-century latinate authors of songs to Venus. It's a delightfully complicated rhetorical frame, one that easily supports Robertson's serious investigation of her terms, and outbursts such as this of Lady M's, from "Cathexis": "I tumble in the luminous musculature/ of an ideology/ Swift and pretty, enclosed as the edged-zest/ Crossed-sex jut of knowledge/ As knowledge is French, bombastic/ End-stopped, supple, passing as a tulip-shaped/ End-stopped panic epistemology, legitimate/ Fantasy. Chthonic Machine!" Along with Thalia Field (see review above), Pamela White Hadas and Stacy Doris, among others, Robertson contributes to a rewarding and varied tradition of post-feminist verse-monologue and drama. (Mar.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: New Star Books
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0921586728
• ISBN 13: 9780921586722
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 2
• Number of pages: 82