Suzanne Buffam’s first collection of poetry, Past Imperfect, won the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award for Poetry, was named a Globe and Mail ‘Top 100’ Book of the Year, and was longlisted for the ReLit Award. She won the 1998 CBC Literary Award for Poetry and has twice been shortlisted for a Pushcart Prize. Her poetry has appeared in various literary magazines and journals in the United States and Canada, including Books in Canada, Poetry, Jubilat, A Public Space, The Canary, The Denver Quarterly, Prairie Schooner, and The Colorado Review. Her work has also appeared in the anthologies Language Matters, Breathing Fire: Canada’s New Poets and Breaking the Surface. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and the Master’s program in English at Concordia University, she currently teaches Creative Writing at the University of Chicago.
Judges’ Citation
Suzanne Buffam’s The Irrationalist takes nothing for granted. Its rhythms manage to mimic the mind at work, the mind edgy and witty and sharp.
Suzanne Buffam’s The Irrationalist takes nothing for granted. Its rhythms manage to mimic the mind at work, the mind edgy and witty and sharp. The tones are brave and sweeping, ready to re-define the world, alert not only to history and the exigencies of the contemporary, but also to larger questions to do with philosophy, with time and space. Buffam’s talent is to find the startling, telling phrase, arranging and turning her lines and cadences with considerable surprise and flair. Some of the poems are funny; others capture culture and nature, or the connections between them, with intelligence, originality and wisdom. Her poetic systems are bathed in irony, but she is also capable of allowing language to soar. In her three-line poem ‘On Last Lines’, she sums up the power of her own poetic gift: ‘The last line should strike like a lover’s complaint./ You should never see it coming./ And you should never hear the end of it.
Selected poems
by Suzanne Buffam
I’m done crying into my beer about love.
My days of riding the shiny brass schoolbus are behind me as well.
The changes come slowly but suddenly.
One day the sun will burn so brightly it will turn all our seas into vast boiling vats.
Freedom comes from understanding our lack of ability to change things.
So lead me O Destiny whither is ordained by your decree.
Just please don’t force me to vacuum the stairs.
The quiet that follows the storm may be the same as the quiet before it.
Let the wind blow.
Let it blow down each tree on the bright boulevard.
The things I would most like to change are the things that make me believe change is possible.
Copyright © 2010 Suzanne Buffam
Dim-Lit Interior
At most two thousand stars
Can be seen with the naked eye from earth.
A difficult number to grapple with,
Too large and, on the other hand, too small.
A simple mathematical equation
May throw the problem into relief.
Consider a battlefield.
The fighting has ended
And the bodies lie still in the grass.
How many dead soldiers
Equal the sky overhead?
Copyright © 2010 Suzanne Buffam
On Clear Nights
Few things are more stirring
Than a flag in the wind.
A problem of asethetics vs. ethics.
All morning I study
A tea towel drying on the line.
A flag without a country
Is like desire without an end.
Copyright © 2010 Suzanne Buffam
On Flags
Joy unmixed with sorrow
Is like a fountain turned off at night.
Copyright © 2010 Suzanne Buffam
On Joy
I was ready for a new experience.
All the old ones had burned out.
They lay in little ashy heaps along the roadside
And blew in drifts across the fairgrounds and fields.
From a distance some appeared to be smouldering
But when I approached with my hat in my hands
They let out small puffs of smoke and expired.
Through the windows of houses I saw lives lit up
With the otherworldly glow of TV
And these were smoking a little bit too.
I flew to Rome. I flew to Greece.
I sat on a rock in the shade of the Acropolis
And conjured dusky columns in the clouds.
I watched waves lap the crumbling coast.
I heard wind strip the woods.
I saw the last living snow leopard
Pacing in the dirt. Experience taught me
That nothing worth doing is worth doing
For the sake of experience alone.
I bit into an apple that tasted sweetly of time.
The sun came out. It was the old sun
With only a few billion years left to shine.
Copyright © 2010 Suzanne Buffam