Behind the Blue Gate

Carol Rose's verse shimmers above the landscape of dream and desert, flesh and spirit, revelling in the sensual riches of the Israeli heartland, the body and the thinking heart. Rose exults in the visceral and the verbal, celebrating the resilience of women in Jerusalem and their sisters across generations and faiths. Both brave and brazen, Behind the Blue Gate, the recent winner of the Henry Fuerstenberg Award for Poetry by the Jewish Book Awards Committee, is a literary manifesto unearthing the voices of those silenced by culture and history and inverting master stories h onoured in scripture and myth with startling and liberating imagery. A challenge to the sacred, this collection is as beautiful as it is revolutionary. In an effort to reaffirm the bonds between religions, sexes, families and nations Rose redeems the ancient/modern Jerusalem, reconstituting a land, a legacy, and a language. In five sections, Rose reveals herself a poet priestess, illuminating words real and imagined which envelope us in luminous strands of time and renewal.

Carol Rose won second prize in the Stephen Leacock Poetry competition in 1994 and was nominated in 1996 for the John Hirsch Award for the most promising Manitoba writer. She is a valued colleague of Anne Szumigalski, David Margoshes and other noted prairie authors. Rose has toured with Mennonite poet Di Brandt performing their dialogical work Occupied Territories: An Argument in Poetry. She is currently co-editing Spider Women: A Tapestry of Creativity and Healing with Joan Turner. Carol Rose lives in Winnipeg. Her first poetry collection is Behind the Blue Gate (Beach Holme, 1997), which was recently awarded the Henry Fuerstenberg Award for Poetry by the Jewish Book Awards Committee.