Time Enough
A homage to Robin Skelton. Robin Skelton died in 1997. Written in 2002, these poems are a conversation with him through the screen of his poetry, expanding his concept of poetry as a living screen between writer and reader, and a chance to sit down with him again for a glass of whiskey and some good, clear talk.
The Similkameen Elegies
Inglewood
A hymn to a land loved and lost. An elegy for lost British Columbia, inspired by Charles Lillard’s Rivers Were Promises. It is a a revisitiation in contemporary dress of Iamblichus’ On the Mysteries of the Egyptians, Chaldeans, and Assyrians. The ancient, gnostic theme of the estrangement of humankind from its true self, expressed through the neo-platonic philosophy of Porphyry, is in this book returned to the earth. Behind the screens of Thomas Taylor’s 200 year old translation, and the screens of Iamblichus laying an ancient Egyptian conception of the cosmos into the foundations of medieval rhetoric, lies a world of intense beauty. The loss of this world has led to much of the falsehood and ugliness of the modern world. In these poems, built out of clarity and colloquial speech, that ancient, unified cosmos is purified, and the bureaucratic aspirations of both Thomas Taylor, translator, and Iamblichus, rhetoretician, are laid to rest.
The Faust Book
The tricksters are back. From the drowning mountains above Salzburg, infested by devils, to the castle of the Archbishop and the court of Mad King Ludwig, to the gold mines of the Cariboo and Judge Mathew Bailie Begbie, this is a book of transformations, oppression, and a fight for freedom, told in a joyful style, that led directly to Free Will.
A Poet in British British Columbia
A poet’s journey, a Malte Laurid’s Brigge for our time. This is my first non-fiction book focussing on the art I love, rather than the land and people I, yes, love.
Ranging from the poetry wars of the 1970s to the Vancouver Folk Festival in 1984, from new interpretations of Rilke and Celan, explorations of Shakespeare’s dabbling in alchemy, the tarot, Ezra Pound, Pat Lane, Charles Lillard, Al Purdy, J.M. Yates, this book presents a theory of poetry of the last two generations as a Cold War struggle lying at the heart of an understanding of our time. This is a personal book, though — lyrical and centred in people and place. As I’ve toured the province reading and teaching poetry, time and again I have come across writers who are still shell-shocked, twenty-five years later, from writing classes they took in B.C.’s poetry wars. This book is for them.
Letters for a Young Poet
Eunoia for lovers.Christian Bök’s Eunoia was a publishing sensation: 5 chapters, one for each vowel, with the limitation that the words in each chapter could contain only the vowel represented by that chapter. Well, that’s the diving board. Here are the consonants, bravely advising young poets led into romance by Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet, in a series of midnight trysts in baroque gardens, formal dances with Anna Karenina, and sonorous exuberance. These are poems to be read aloud.
Lost Works
Two lost manuscripts of open field verse lost in the creation of A Delicate Fire, returned after fifteen years. Fifteen years of immersion in William Carlos’ Williams Pictures from Brueghel inspired me to lay down my poems as scripts for the spoken voice. The result was an open, colloquial style which led to all my books after 1985, and which was suppressed by an editor. When I received the manuscripts back, mildewed, and sealed in a rusty metal box, in 2000, I realized that that editor had been wrong. These poems lift off of the page.
The Anatomy of a Play
The story of a crazy experiment in community theatre. While the armed standoff was going down at Gustafson Lake, a bunch of us living in 100 Mile House got together to start a community theatre. I wanted to do Romeo and Juliet as a conflict between the RCMP and the Secwepemc. Others wanted to do a murder mystery, or maybe some dinner theatre. What we got instead was a performance of an epic creation story from the Ainu People of Hokkaido, set against the bombing of Hiroshima, which included miners’ lamps, old computers scrolling in green glow, multi-track taped recordings, and Ainu chants, in one crazed performance in an old dormitory painted black and full of pillars. Here is the story of a community off the grid, told with affection.
Dear Will
Cynical, naive, caustic, wild, Shakespeare’s boy tells his story from the modelling studios, stages, and back streets. Shakespeare’s sonnets were intended to make him and his lovers live forever.They have the haunting subtext of a love affair with a young boy. In Living Will, I freed Shakespeare from the cage of the poems, so he could live again. In Dear Will I complete the circle. Here the boy lives, dwarfing Shakespeare in his appetite for life.
The Rilke Project
The Rilke Project is a series of approaches to translating Rainer Maria Rilke’s Duino Elegies in a way that accurately represents the polyphonous and mercurial voice of the poet.
