Deluge

Today's poem-of-the-day I thought a fitting choice for those of you who may have spent 3.5 hours this weekend watching a) Yul Brynner be fabulous, and b) Charlton Heston grow a beard. The image you see to the side--mercifully not Mr. Heston--is a print by Segbingway called "Out of their Element," and was featured on the cover of Patricia Young's collection. (Segbingway, as I'm sure you all know by now, is the illustrator for our forthcoming Reasonable Ogre by Mike Barnes.) Enjoy!

Deluge

Patricia Young
from Here Come the Moonbathers, 2008

And it came to pass, when men began to multiply on the face of the earth, and daughters were born unto them, that the sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair, and they took them wives of all which they chose. – Genesis 6: 1-2

I walked a long way in an old pair of sandals
and when I looked up
I saw the fiery shape of a man
revolving in a field of blue space.

My knees locked, my tongue split like a flame.

In those days the world was immaculate
and devoid of memory.
It was difficult to think
without hearing
the language of birds.

His face emerged slowly,
feature by nascent feature.
And then his neck/chest/thighs –
all perfect, all splendidly formed.

He put on a body of flesh
as though putting on a suit of fine cloth.

Roses bloomed over the dip
of thorny hills and my eye cocked
toward Paradise.

*

Standing in the dark, braiding the horse’s mane,
I felt him lean into the blank
pools of my thoughts. He was
clean intelligence, incandescent.

Sex with an angel?
my sister said, pulling
water from the well, her voice
dipped in arsenic.

I no longer knew what I was –
woman or jackal, fish or flying thing.

*

Where had he come from?

I didn’t know, nor did I ask
if he’d been sent to me as some kind of
balm to the curse of being human.

A restlessness seized him.
He grew pale, spoke of the place he’d forsaken,
his words the same swollen sounds
scratched on the walls outside Eden.
And then the gibberish in his sleep –
the sky bursting open like a goat-skin bottle,
the ark’s wooden doors
slamming shut.

*

Those final days –
walking among the aloe trees,
leaves trembling like my senses.
The nightingale drunk on his beauty.
The giraffe weeping as he passed.
Bees clung to his skin. Everything
from the protozoan to our hybrid son
banging his breakfast bowl on the table
appeared resplendent and tragic.
I understood even the lowest embryo
manifests will, desire, a terrible cunning.

*

Death by drowning.

Should he have warned me, I whom he could not save?
Should he have whispered that last night of love –
When the rains finally come I will pass through your world like the voice of an animal.

Patricia Young Reading

Over at The New Quarterly's blog, The Literary Type, Rosalynn has posted a podcast of the reading from Patricia Young's recent tour. Worth a listen, on this second Friday of Poetry Month.

Photo, once again, by A. J. Somerset, of Combat Camera fame.

Patricia Young, after a reading.

Headed to London for a quick trip on Wednesday to share a curry with house-bound David Hickey and listen to Patricia Young read as part of the Poetry London Series. A. J. Somerset was in attendance, and took some photographs at the pub after the event, including this one. He has been promoted to Biblioasis's official photographer, just so long as he promises to keep me out of his viewfinder.

A wonderful reading, great conversation and company, passable beer.

For the (brief) story behind this photograph, please go here.

Here come the Moonbathers: Victoria Book Award Finalist

Patricia Young's 2008 collection of poetry Here Come the Moonbathers has been selected as a finalist for the Victoria Butler Book Award. It's the second time she's been short-listed for the award with a Biblioasis title, the first coming with her first collection of short fiction, Airstream.

The winner will be announced on October 14th at 7:30 pm at a gala event. The winner receives $5000.00.

The other finalists are:
Dede Crane, for the Cult of Quick Repair
Patrick Lane for Red Dog, Red Dog
David Leach for Fatal Tide
Ilana Stanger-Ross for Sima's Undergarments for Women.

Congratulations to Patricia for some much deserved recognition for what is a very fine book!

Patricia and Terence Young at the UBC Bookstore

Thanks to Zach Wells for posting a reading over at CLM of Biblioasis authors -- current and future -- Patricia and Terence Young. We've published a couple of excellent books by Patricia, her first collection of short fiction the Metcalf-Rooke Award winning Airstream, and her last collection of poetry, from which she reads here, Here Come the Moonbathers. We'll be publishing a new collection of short fiction from Terence, likely Spring '10.

You can check out the reading here. A bit of background noise, so you'll need to turn up the volume, but well worth a listen.

Three Reviews...

In the Winter 2009 issue of Arc -- Volume 61 -- there are three reviews of Biblioasis Poetry titles. The first, of Robyn Sarah's Little Eurekas: A Decade's Thoughts on Poetry. T'is a feature review, and largely full of praise:

"I've never met Sarah, and was previously familiar only with her poems, but i've come to like her through these essays. Conversational in tone, her voice sounds like that of a friend. ... This easy-going style gives the book much of its clarity and approachability, two traits that poetry -- and poetry criticism -- could use more of.

Nest up: Shane Neilson on Patricia Young's Here Come the Moonbathers:

"She's the poet of compression, of no time and small space. ... Young at her best writes a noose around loss ... There is indeed a quiet, firm, almost questing brand of dignity in Young's brand of loss. It has made for an excellent collection ..."

Lastly, a review of Zach Wells's sonnet anthology Jailbreaks, which Alessandro Porco says "has scope ... As with any anthology, there are a few head-scratchers ... but also some jaw-droppingly good eye- (and ear-) openers."

Poetry to Warm the Wintry Soul

An article on the poetry of Patricia Young appeared in yesterday's Victoria Times-Colonist. If you go to the Times-Colonist website, there's a audio recording of her reading the poem printed here.

FRAGMENTS OF CHILDHOOD EFFORTS, HEARD BY MOM, STAY WITH HER

Patricia Young has been writing poems for as long as she can remember. Her early poems, fragments of which she can still recite, were about nature. Her mom was her first audience.

"She was nice enough to listen to them," says the 54-year-old Young, who was born and raised in Victoria. "When I look back, I don't think they were very good, but it gave me enough encouragement to continue."

oday she writes for a larger audience. So far she has published nine books of poetry and one of fiction. The quality of her work has also improved. The list of her achievements since 1987 include being nominated twice for the Governor General's Award for Poetry and winning the Pat Lowther Award, the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Award and others. Her first collection of fiction, Airstream, also won the Metcalf-Rooke Award.

She has been a writer in residence in several universities, the latest at the University of New Brunswick. It was during a hard winter in New Brunswick that she was inspired to write today's poem.

Young lives in Fairfield with her husband, Terence, who is also an award-winning poet. The couple met when Patricia was only 16; they have two grown children.

The husband-and-wife team occasionally spend time at their other home in Highlands, using it as a retreat for their writing.

"We help each other out," Young says. "It makes life easier when your spouse understands your work." -- Pedro Arrais, Times Colonist

- - -

The Times Colonist asked six Victoria-area poets to create poems for the winter season.

Today we present the fifth, Patricia Young's Cherry Tree in Winter.

The last will follow tomorrow on the front page of the Life section.

CHERRY TREE IN WINTER

By Patricia Young

Icicles hang from the eaves, the size of a man and twice as lethal.

Today I trudge through the snow-deep city in my landlord's parka.

Within its sheltering hood I hear nothing but rustling inside my head.

Here, winter goes on and on and I'm tired of my own thoughts.

Through snow-deep streets I trudge in my landlord's down parka.

On the other coast you get out the lopper, prune the cherry tree.

Here, winter goes on and on and I'm tired of my own thoughts.

On the phone you say, So much light. Now the leaves won't shadow the deck.

On the west coast, you get out the lopper and prune the cherry tree.

For years I've asked you to take it down -- too much foliage, too little fruit.

The light, you say on the phone. Now the leaves won't shadow the deck.

Tonight I love that its branches still hold our daughter's tree fort aloft.

For years I've asked you to take it down -- too much foliage, too little fruit.

And the trunk serves as a post for our son's Guatemalan hammock.

I love that its branches still hold a childhood tree fort aloft.

Beneath three quilts I dream I'm a tree riddled with blossoms and birds, a diamond-weave hammock swaying in a Guatemalan market.

Inside my sheltering head: the sound of rustling green. Husband,

you are the riddle beneath which I dream blossoms and birds, but

when I wake, icicles hang from the eaves, the size of a man and twice as lethal.

- - -

- To hear Patricia Young reading her poem, visit www.timescolonist.com

A Review of Patricia Young's Here Come the Moonbathers

from Fredericton's Daily Gleaner.

Though her fans were delighted when she won the 2006 Metcalfe-Rooke Award for Canadian fiction, few knew why Patricia Young, twice shortlisted for the Governor General's Award for Poetry, moved unexpectedly to prose.

The former University of New Brunswick writer-in-residence answers that question in Here Come the Moonbathers, her first volume of poetry since 2000.

Assembled and revised this spring in a blue house overlooking Fredericton's St. John River, Young's new poems are provocative. They pinch. They prod. There's anger to which you'll say Whoa! until you've thought things through.

The dazzling lyric voice, pictorial quality, empathy, and terror of Young's Ruin and Beauty: New & Selected Poems (House of Anansi) is conspicuous, as is the poet's interest in the close connection between love and loss. What appears to have changed is the attitude toward experience that informs her writing.

Although Live Trap whimsically contrasts a boy's behaviour with that of rodents, its true subject is perception - tricks of the brain. Mice "[f]ar-seeing and fatalistic / but also capable of Houdini-like feats . . . light up the mind's nether regions, / always an afterimage, the thing that just was."

In Nocturnal, assonance, consonance, and kinetic lines help illuminate age and gender differences.

By day, "human cannonballs" (aligned with "phallic" cattails) hurl themselves from docks; girls (the moonbathers of the title) reject "noon's buttery spit." Precociously "wise to the moles threatening / to hatch tiny brown / spiders / on the downy / smalls of their backs," they slide into "gelatinous black water" after dark.

Desolate the Gooseberry records how it feels to lose a father ("Summer's elsewhere, a butterfly behind glass"); Mother Tongue highlights family life's astonishing gifts: "In each nest // a small miracle rubs against a great sorrow."

Before Sleep, A Conversation confronts fear head on:

She says, I was thirty-eight before I got it -

I mean, really got it - that I'd die too.

That sucking sound isn't the river, he says, it's the sound of us dying.

Though many have experimented boldly with poetic form, few have matched Young's proficiency: The haunting repetition of the pantoum suits The Day the Pigs Got Loose, Jack(s)knife and Miracle of Language perfectly.

In Praise of Poetry (or Why I Stopped Writing It) shows even strong writers what to aim for. Grievous Road, Melt (Patricia Young on climate change), Adoption, 1962, and Deluge will take your breath away.

- reviewed by DIANE REID

Patricia Young reading in Victoria B.C.

Join in an exciting literary evening with authors Patricia Young (Here Comes the Moonbathers) and Trevor Carolan who will read from and sign their new books, Friday, September 19 at 7:30 p.m. (doors open 7 p.m.) at Red Brick Cafe, 2423 Beacon Avenue. It will be an entertaining evening with music by Mark Bracken, guitarist. Enter the book draw to win a signed copy of writers’ books.

Admission $5. Sponsored by Community Arts Council of Saanich Peninsula. Pick up brochures at Sidney bookstores. For more information call 250-655-4447.

Review of Young's Moonbathers...

... in the Winnipeg Free Press. Are they one of the ONLY metropolitan newspapers which review Canadian poetry with any regularity any more? Certainly they seem to review it MORE than any other paper I know of. Kudos and thanks due to Walker Morley and everyone at the Winnipeg Free Press who are still willing to give that most un-commercial of collections -- the poetry book -- weekly attention.

Here's the part of the review dealing with Young's Moonbathers. As far as I know this is the first review of this collection thus far, which is a bit ridiculous, considering her previous two collections received G-G shortlist nods. But t'is the way of things these days.

Free verse impressive for its rhythmic control

By: Maurice Mierau

Updated: August 24 at 12:10 AM CDT

• Print Article
• E-mail Article
• ShareThis

Victoria writer Patricia Young's ninth book of poetry, Here Come the Moonbathers (Biblioasis, 80 pages, $18) is beautifully crafted, subtle and emotionally intense.

Young's free verse is impressive for its rhythmic control. Notice the double stress pattern here, the one long line, and then the return to pattern:

Why the bone clock?

Who the bone clock?

What to say about the bone clock

except it stopped when the world was still caterwauling

tooth and claw.

Young doesn't simply produce one kind of rhythmic variation. In Twenty Questions she deploys a casual five stress line: "Dad smells of mulched leaves, something sweetly organic./ Pulverized beach shells spill from his eye sockets."

She also has a rare gift for metaphorical thinking, where a metaphor is initially somewhat mysterious, and then comes into perfectly logical focus:

Your perfect life is not a poem after all.

Which is fine except your blood is full of magnets.

You'd like to smuggle yourself out of the abandoned city

but you're stuck to the fridge... .

Here Come the Moonbathers

Poet Laureate John Steffler has published Patricia Young's poem Melt, from her upcoming Spring Biblioasis collection Here Come the Moonbathers -- her first poetry collection in over 8 years -- as the poem of the week of the Poet Laureate website. The website can be found here:

www.parl.gc.ca/Information/about/people/poet/index.asp?lang=e&param=4&id=1&id3=1

And here is Patricia's poem:

MELT

by Patricia Young

“We can’t even describe what we’re seeing.”
Chair of the Inuit Circumpolar conference.

One morning they appear in nameless droves.
Fabulous creatures flicking their silver fins and ancient jewels.

A long lost mythology? Weird migration?
They lurched onto the tundra like bawling infants,

announced themselves with the subtlety of a brass band.
Wave upon wave, antlers vibrating, tails ablaze.

Who? we asked. Who are you?
One day they weren’t there and the next

they were traveling toward us
with the speed of a birchwood forest.

We gathered to mourn those passing
swiftly into memory, the polar bear and arctic seal.

Time cracked.
The century was thinner than ice.

We had 1200 words for reindeer but not one
for hornet, robin, elk, salmon, barn owl.

Try to understand: we had never seen a barn.
Never stepped into such a cavernous space.

*

We have never stepped into a cavernous space.
Try to understand: we have never seen a barn.

Hornet, robin, elk, salmon, barn owl.
We have 1200 words for reindeer but not one

for a century thinner than ice.
Time cracks.

Swiftly into memory: the polar bear and arctic seal.
We gather to mourn those passing

with the speed of a birchwood forest,
the new ones travelling toward us.

One day they aren’t here and the next
we ask, Who? Who are you?

Wave upon wave, antlers vibrating, tails ablaze.
They announce themselves with the subtlety of a brass band,

lurch onto the tundra like bawling infants.
A long lost mythology? Weird migration?

Fabulous creatures flicking their silver fins and ancient jewels
appear one morning in nameless droves.