Shane Book is an award-winning poet and filmmaker. He was educated at the University of Victoria, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and Stanford University where he was a Wallace Stegner Fellow. His writing has appeared in more than twenty anthologies, including The Great Black North: Contemporary African Canadian Poetry.
Judges’ Citation
Here is a contemporary world music that whirls the reader into the centre of the action at once.
Here is a contemporary world music that whirls the reader into the centre of the action at once. Here is a spread of thoughts with a winning beat, a door held open to varieties of sound and content from multiple cultures. In these beautifully adept pages, English as we know it is not the only language we are reading but a spread of voices receptive to webs and forms from everywhere else. It’s a new poetics but also wholly recognizable in its content. An outcry written to be heard while reading: this poetry signals a breakthrough necessary, innovative and emotionally piercing.
Selected poems
by Shane Book
1
I broke off the dangling shrub and inserted it above my ear.
Bent in at the belly I sweated, to fit to try to fit.
2
The dangling shrub was bruised
It moved a little move and Lady Song-of-Jamestown
said in my hear: Why is broken.
3
Spooked I
leapt a leafy thwart
into my thinking vessel the aluminum canoe
and in my here said Lady Song-of-Jamestown:
“Why its smelters long ago felled at The-Task-Is-
Incomplete, a falling
artist felling them name of
The-Coriander-of-Mother-and-Child
who wears crown of shells partly concealing
a turban of layered light.”
4
I stared straight ahead, paddling
My canoe walls hung with barkcloth a giant dentalium
and four figureheads in lignified paste (We watching).
The ivory one, called Tapping-Out-of-Time.
And the dark muscular one, Below-the-Galleon-Decks.
And the remembered one named, Palm-Thatch-Floor.
And the little one called, Fruit-of-the-Distant-Weep
(mothered black, from sleeping).
5
Lady Song-of-Jamestown mending her fishnets
pulled the water-hook from my hand.
Copyright © Shane Book 2014
from Flagelliform 61: Tilted Away
I have a home in my son’s hand.
The pier is out, the quay closed at noon.
You can sob, so be it, as if dates, as
though you had an oven of dough
everyone wanted. Day, I’m a over it;
out rowing an O.K. used pear,
sailing your barcode, you shop with the pain
you’re out now, avowing.
Our row cake vice squeezing through
sewer hour, I sail mystery O
sewer! Made on that pall of rat veil
A forms a dream navy
in the unclear I don’t miss saying.
Copyright © Shane Book 2014