Items related to Learning to Count

Learning to Count - Softcover

Douglas Burnet Smith

 
9781897181379: Learning to Count

Synopsis

In Learning to Count, Douglas Burnet Smith explores the counterpoint between everyday, often innocent, experiences and the darker elegiac tones of history. The lyricism of Tuscany s sublime skies merges into J.M.W. Turner s obsession with clouds and the author s own retracing of Turner s sources of inspiration. Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, Louis Riel, Giuseppe Garibaldi, Benito Mussolini, Robert Desnos, Napoleon and a contemplative lizard on a Corsican mountainside all have their roles to play. In brutal contrast, the author, taking his own child to a school in France, encounters horrifying evidence of the murder of hundreds of children by French Nazi collaborators. But throughout, Smith measures the impact of his encounters with distinctly Canadian insight and awareness. And so finally the journey returns home, to Canada, to Halifax, Nova Scotia, where Pablo Picasso magically leads a naked chorus line through the streets of the city. The journey has been exhilarating, exhausting, at times almost unbearable but always, always magical.

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About the Author

DOUGLAS BURNET SMITH is the author of over a dozen books of poetry. His work has won the Malahat Review s Long Poem Prize, and has been nominated for a Governor General s Award and the Atlantic Poetry Prize. He has been Writer in Residence at a number of universities in Canada and the U. S., and has served as President of the League of Canadian Poets, as well as Chair of the Public Lending Right Commission of Canada. He teaches at St. Francis Xavier University, in Antigonish, Nova Scotia, and at the American University of Paris. He divides his time between Canada, France, and Argentina.

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