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Description
Melanie Siebert’s stunning debut collection travels remote northern rivers, as well as two of Canada’s most threatened rivers, the Athabasca and the North Saskatchewan. These rivers push the poems into a contemplation of loss and into the terrain of Alexander Mackenzie’s dreams, a busker’s broken-down street riffs, and the borderland wanderings of a grandmother whose absence is felt as a presence. The poems’ currents are turbulent, braided, submerged. Narrative streams appear like tributaries glimpsed through brush, and then veer into unexpected territories, where boundaries blur – between the self and the other, between the living and the dead, between the human and the wild – and loss carries with it both music and silence. In this virtuoso collection, Melanie Siebert has transformed language into that rarest thing, a singular poetic vision.
Additional information
| Weight | 0.12712 kg |
|---|---|
| Dimensions | 0.5588 × 13.843 × 20.8788 cm |
| Author(s) | |
| Format Old` | |
| Language | |
| Publisher | |
| Year Published | 2010-3-30 |
| Imprint | |
| Publication City/Country | Canada |
| ISBN 10 | 0771080336 |
| About The Author | Melanie Siebert recently completed an MFA at the University of Victoria with a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Fellowship. Her poetry has been broadcast on CBC Radio and published in The Walrus, The Malahat Review, Event, and Prairie Fire. For more than ten years, she has worked as a guide on wilderness rivers across the north from Alaska to Baffin Island. |
| Table Of Content | Current Deepwater Vee Bellanca Esker Alsek Lake Bridge to Shell’s Albian Mine, Downstream, River Right Busker Busker Surf City Mackenzie ’s Dream Choker Busker Skull Canyon Unnamed Creek Busker Mackenzie ’s Dream Grandmother Grandmother Hell Roaring Creek Busker Grass Hills, River Left, Downstream of Battleford Grandmother The Limit of Travels in This Direction Busker Mackenzie, Having Not Seen a Star Since Leaving Athabasca Busker Shifting, Overrun, the Symptoms, the Shoals Building D’Aoust Esker Nadlok—place where the deer cross Map Unrolled on the Table Grandmother Letter to Kitty, Never Written Long After Leaving, Being Overtaken with the Consequences of Suffering in the Northwest Letter to Kitty, Never Written Letter to Kitty, Never Written Letter to Kitty, Never Written Letter to Kitty, Never Written Letter to Kitty, Never Written Dusk Windbound, Unnamed Camp Tlogotsho—big place of grass Double-Barrel Lake The Splits Notes Acknowledgements |
| Excerpt From Book | CURRENT On your knees in a boat with sweet rocker and no keel, water pillowsup against the red hull with its silt hiss. You sight the drops betweenboulders, gear and your yeah-buts, your okay-maybes lashed tight, andyou heel the canoe on its side for the swift eddy-in, the river’s leggy coltgleam.Spruce reel by, the limestone peaks, skids of outwash. The riversticks a coin behind its ear, pulls two from its wrist. You’ve brought food from far away, burned fuel climbing the passesto the Great Divide, ramped, crevassed, the great glacier spilling threeways: Pacific, Arctic, Atlantic. You’re taking the low moan of mileshome, heading east, northeast, the winded push to the Interior Plains.Even sandstone and the shale beds of the foothills weather in. River of mixed tongues and guns traded west, frayed edge of themuscle-old herds chewing the hills, fringe between grassland and aspenparkland. The river opaque in all seasons, cartilage, cash flow. WhenPeter Erasmus first tried the ford, his horse shook him loose and hewould’ve drowned but someone yelled, Grab her tail. River of last hunts,the Thirst Dance, the broad forehead of Horsechild, just a boy sweatingat his father’s side on the long walk to surrender at Carlton in the wolfybreath-heat of the downcast grass. River, slab of the weathered-down, low under the long hunger, low tothe bulked-up meat of the farms, low now, low under the berms of thefat lip. Thick backs of murky sturgeon, sinew of the who-knows-where.And the river slows, gull-flush and scavenging, and you cruise on thegaze of deer, lowrider sliding the afternoon in the valley of the willowof stealth. Opal. Inner wrist of what’s left. You carry water from taps and don’t know how to eat what’s here. Youhaven’t built your boat, still you take a bearing in the magnetic field ofrunoff, beam your signals to the satellites of fallen birds. And this boatgrafts you to water’s big-winged glide, its giveaway, the cool salve of itsgoing-going-gone, pushing to a wavering long-held note. Inner wrist,underworld. Water on the downgrade, flowing loaded and filmed. — North Saskatchewan River |
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