Saturday, February 26, 2011

Sunrise in the Eyes of the Snowman

A first review of Goran Simic's new collection Sunrise in the eyes of the Snowman was published in this morning's Telegraph Journal. The book launches in Edmonton at Audrey's Books a week from today, March 6th, at 2 pm.

From the review:

Simic writes from in-between languages, lands, self and others and stages of a life. It's a position perhaps made clearest in the opening lines of An Ordinary Man - "I am an ordinary man with ears of ordinary silk / and I speak only with a voice I've heard somewhere, / a voice like an echo."

Some poems employ rhyming quatrains. But Simic, wisely, uses this structure sparingly so that the form doesn't overwhelm the ideas. For example, the back-to-back pairing of No Time to Waste and When I Reached the Border, which both use the ABAB variation, work particularly well for two poems about a race for, and a crossing of, finishing lines. In the former, he's a "false stallion" tiring of life's everyday horse race. In the latter, he's "a mere bricklayer," shattered and heartbroken. He arrives at that boundary "already dead." The last line reads: "I have already died once. And now I'll never grow old."

The whole review can be read here. The book can be purchased from any quality independent (our preference), online or through our website here.



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