Hugh MacLennan Poetry
3 total works
Walk away before you are threadbare / Preserve your strength, preserve your curly hair / For others' use. Least I can do. / Let your fabric relax, snap back to mold / Another body and reveal its gold. A collection of 120 sonnets in eight parts, Trio reveals, frame by frame, a married fortysomething female narrator in love with two younger men - an intellectual and a dancer - and torn between the claims of body and mind. In the tradition of Renaissance sonnet sequences from Petrarch onward, the narrator's love objects are constantly before her eyes, and thus before ours, creating compassion, comedy, and desire. They are real and imaginary, opposite and complementary, present and unavailable, autonomous and dependent. Tolmie's characters circle and shadow one another in every dance, spinning until fantasy becomes flesh and entanglement. In immortalizing the beloved, she draws on the power of both poetic and human reproduction. Like the contact improvisation modern dance form that influences the collection, these poems are both expressive and analytical.
Through a singular feminist revision of a traditional poetic form, they tell the story - sometimes raunchy, sometimes crushingly sad - of a strong protagonist and the predicament she's in.
Through a singular feminist revision of a traditional poetic form, they tell the story - sometimes raunchy, sometimes crushingly sad - of a strong protagonist and the predicament she's in.
Hairless apes, while they're alive / Need a community to thrive. / Bald fact. Hard-won freedoms of choice and association lead us to flock together in groups of the like-minded. Check is a book of contemporary poetic satire about the groups that we inevitably form and their consequences: in-groups and out-groups and mutual suspicion. When we look around at others, and talk about them amongst ourselves, we agree. Sarah Tolmie writes about parents and teenagers, social media users, different kinds of writers, university professors, feminists, celebrities, pundits -- each one in possession of a different truth and determined to defend it. Hatred and intolerance are always the province of other people, never ourselves. Check begins and ends with the premise that toleration is exceedingly difficult and exasperating; it should not be casually assumed, and failures in it are universal. There has never been a tolerant society before, certainly not a global one.
Hate to tell you, but you're going to die. / Quite soon. Me, too. / Shuck off the wisdom while it's warm. / Death does no harm / To wisdom. Sarah Tolmie's second collection of poems is a traditional ars moriendi, a how-to book on the practices of dying. Confronting the fear of death head-on, and describing the rituals that mitigate it, the poems in The Art of Dying take a satirical look at the ways we explain, enshrine, and, above all, evade death in contemporary culture. Some poems are personal – a parent tries to explain to a child why a grandfather is in hospital, or stages a funeral for a child's imaginary friend – while others comment on how death figures in the news, on TV, and in social media. Some poems ask if there is any place left for poets in our rituals of memory and commemoration. A few examine the apocalyptic language of climate change. Others poke fun at the death-defying claims of posthumanism. A thoughtful and irreverent collection about serious concerns, The Art of Dying begins and ends with the fact of death, and strips away our euphemisms about it.