Poets introducing poets! The Scotland-Canada exchange
April 2007 : Feature
John Burnside introducing Aislinn Hunter
There is a poem of Aislinn Hunter’s entitled “Everything Lost is Found Again” that is both short enough, and deceptively simple enough for me to quote here in its entirety:
the ring that lay for months behind the dresser,
the book finally returned by a friend,
apples reborn in the boughs of an old tree
and the years appearing suddenly
ripe fruit in the open hand.
The brevity of this poem is important, because it highlights Aislinn Hunter’s gift for poetic economy (which is not to say that her poems are always short; rather, that she is one of those poets who has an uncanny ability to say exactly as much as she wants with the most economical of means). What matters more, however, is the deceptive simplicity: Hunter is forever taking us into what we think of as familiar territory—whether it be familiar images, familiar ideas, seemingly well-worn philosophical notions—and revealing what was missed, in all that supposed familiarity: what we took for granted, what we didn’t want to acknowledge, or even—as in this poem—what we gave up on too soon.
October 2006 : Feature
Anna Crowe introducing Stephen Scobie
Stephen Scobie and I were students together at St Andrews, when he was in his fourth year, already a fluent poet, knowledgeable film-buff and expert on the music of Bob Dylan, and I was a bejantine, as first-year students were then called. A group of us used to meet in Tad’s Café to have lunch and play the juke-box. Our liking for the Kinks earned us the scornful jibe, from local high-school kids, of “has-been teenagers!” After Stephen went to Canada to do his doctorate, and then stayed to teach English literature in a Canadian University (he teaches at the University of Victoria), we lost touch. Years later, I had the bright idea of inviting him (he now had many poetry collections and prizes and other publications to his name) to come and read his work at StAnza [the Scottish poetry festival in St Andrews], which he did in 2004, giving an electrifying performance. His poetry is richly allusive, drawing on his wide and intimate knowledge of literature, music, art and history, to pursue his themes of sorrow and desire. He has been described as “the restless connoisseur of travel”, and he certainly knows Paris and its troubled literary history as well as anyone, and better than most. He is a poet’s poet, deeply satisfying to read closely, and his fierce, lyrical poems yield up more and more with each successive reading.
August 2006 : Feature
Tom Pow introducing Don McKay
In “Fridge Nocturne”, a short poem near the beginning of Don McKay’s selected poems, the sleepless poet lies listening to the sound of his fridge, ‘the old/armless weeping willow of the kitchen’. The fridge’s “Humble murmur” brings to his mind several distant rivers—“the Saugeen, the Goulais/the Raisin”. The permeability of the border between the domestic world and the wilderness which lies beyond it marks a landscape whose vastness teaches early that, “Lonely is a knife whose handle fits the mind/too well, its oldest and most hospitable friend” (“Nocturnal Animals”). However, “There is a loneliness/ which must be entered rather than resolved” (“On Leaving”) and to enter the wilderness with Don McKay is to have the sharpest, most informed and responsive guide. Here are his thoughts on the White-throated Sparrow:
I was thinking of the muscles in that grey-white breast,
pectoralis major powering each downstroke,
pectoralis minor with its rope-and-pulley tendon
reaching through the shoulder to the
topside of the humerus to haul it up again;
of the sternum with the extra keel it has evolved to
anchor all that effort, of the dark wind
and the white curl on the waves below, the slow dawn
and the thickening shoreline. (“Load”)
May 2006 : Feature
John Glenday introducing Karen Solie
I met Karen Solie and heard her read, and was impressed when I returned to Edmonton for a reunion of Writers in Residence in March 2006. She read in one of the newer buildings of the University – one wall a curve of windows and steady snow falling outside. There was a hush both sides of the glass. She read well. Afterwards I bought her pamphlet The Shooter’s Bible and discovered that her poems sound as good on the page as they read in the air, that they had weight as well as music. I went straight back and bought Modern and Normal, her latest collection.
Two poems caught my attention that first day: ‘An Argument for Small Arms’, in which Solie subtly conflates details of gunmanship and desire and ‘The Birds of British Columbia’ a gem of a ‘found’ poem which I kept pondering and rereading for the rest of my stay in Canada.
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