Books
Edited
Penned:
Zoo Poems
(Vehicule Press, 2009)
Edited by
Stephanie Bolster,
Katia Grubisic and Simon Reader
Penned: Zoo Poems gathers English-language poems from around the world, spanning more than a century of captivation with the worlds inside the cage and out. Our guides on this journey, at times nostalgic, haunting, whimsical and provocative, include eminent and emerging poets Margaret Atwood, Elizabeth Bishop, Lorna Crozier, Countee Cullen, Emily Dickinson, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Ted Hughes, AA Milne, Marianne Moore, Al Purdy, AK Ramanujan, and Matthew Sweeney. The poems themselves are as rich and varied as the species they corral. We wander through the poems of this eclectic anthology as through a zoo, looking back at the animal, to paraphrase Randell Jarrell, like the animal.
“… a quirky and thoroughly interesting collection of poetry that is remarkably diverse.”
- Jay Ruzesky,
The Malahat Review
“Anyone fond of animals will want to read Penned, a remarkably wide-ranging collection of poems about zoos … The selection in this anthology is international and brilliant …”
- Bert Almon,
Montreal Review of Books
The Best Canadian Poetry
in English
(Tightrope Books, 2008)
Edited by Stephanie Bolster
Series Editor: Molly Peacock
The Best Canadian Poetry series has become as valued an annual tradition in Canada as its American counterpart has been in the U.S. for decades. In this inaugural edition of the Canadian series, guest editor Stephanie Bolster presents 50 poems chosen from Canadian literary journals and magazines from the preceding year.
The Ishtar Gate:
Diana Brebner
(McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2004)
Elemental, elegant,
and passionate poems that claim as their symbol the Ishtar Gate:
a threshold between the past
and the future, the old world
and the new.
“We are always in the middle of life, looking forwards and backwards; the only movement we can make to defy physics and history is the journey of the spirit. The Ishtar Gate, a ceremonial gate from the palace of Nebuchadnezzar at Babylon, reconstructed and housed in the Staatliche Museum, Berlin, is my personal symbol for the merging of ancient and modern culture, the old goddess-centred religions and the scholarly, rational West.” So wrote Diana Brebner of the book she planned to write. Though cancer claimed her life before she could complete this project, she wrote some thirty poems towards it. Here is a poet in extreme control of her craft: the aesthetic refinement, the musicality of language, the spiritual vision, and the playfulness that drew readers to Brebner's previous award-winning books - Radiant Life Forms, The Golden Lotus, and Flora & Fauna - resonate with even greater force in her last poems.