Strangers
Published on 6. April 2021
78 pages
978-1-77196-420-3 (ISBN)
Description
"It makes no sense. You would be strangers / if not for this."
In Strangers, Rob Taylor makes new the epiphany poem: the short lyric ending with a moment of recognition or arrival. In his hands, the form becomes not simply a revelation in words but, in Wallace Stevens' phrase, "a revelation in words by means of the words." The epiphany here is not only the poet's. It's ours. A book about the songlines of memory and language and the ways in which they connect us to other human beings, to read Strangers is to become part of the lineages (literary, artistic, familial) that it braids together-to become, as Richard Outram puts it, an "unspoken / Stranger no longer."
More details
Person
Rob Taylor is the author of four poetry collections, including Strangers (Biblioasis, 2021) and The News (Gaspereau Press, 2016), which was a finalist for the 2017 Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize. He is also the editor of What the Poets Are Doing: Canadian Poets in Conversation (Nightwood Editions, 2018) and the guest editor of Best Canadian Poetry 2019 (Biblioasis, 2019). Rob lives with his family in Port Moody, BC.
Content
- Cover
- Title Page
- Copyright
- Dedication
- Contents
- Strangers
- You ask me about my mother
- Smoothing the Holy Surfaces
- That Scar
- Lunch
- Speak When Illuminated
- A Normal Day
- Love, fidelity, etc.
- The bucket is blue and deep and brims with cool water
- Aubade
- Weather in Dublin
- Ultrasound
- The Future
- Colic
- Transatlantic
- November, Six a.m.
- The Jockey of Artemision
- One Lie
- Krakatoa
- 3M
- What Wisdom's in Wisdom Recorded?
- At Roblin Lake
- Voices
- The Artist
- The Long Goodbye
- Stroking your back through a nightmare
- Poems
- King Tide
- The Commons
- Lazienki Park
- On the Occasion of my Mother First Forgetting my Name
- The Baffled King
- Diagnosis
- What did you dream about?
- Most days you still remember
- Old Game
- Why and Why
- Transmission Tower
- Reprieve
- Return to Roblin
- Are your flies grass, like mine?
- Matryoshka
- Now I must be gentle
- Long Distance
- Notes
- Acknowledgments
