Documentary and Witness poetry capture the turbulence of contemporary life, its urgent issues where we all often helplessly confront individual crises and global disasters. In this collection of fifteen elegies, a little boy rides his bicycle through the wreckage of his hometown, Mosul; an animal rights activist attempts to rescue a truckload of pigs heading to slaughter; St John ignores the refugees drowning in the Mediterranean and continues to write a chapter of the Judeo-Christian Bible in his cave nearby; in Toronto a homeless beggar woman unexpectedly shows the narrator a glorious Asian pear; and a Japanese fisherman travels to northern B.C. in a redemptive moment encounters his childhood boat and an elusive spirit bear.
Karen Mulhallen has worked as a publisher, editor, teacher and writer, helping to develop a national English literature in Canada by working for decades on non-profit magazines, including Descant and The Canadian Forum. Simultaneously I have published 24 books, while making my living as an English Literature Professor working collaboratively with other multi-disciplinary professionals at a polytechnical University, Ryerson University, in the downtown core of the city of Toronto.
Title: The Scent of Spring, Elegies Out of Season
Author: Mulhallen, Karen
ISBN: 9781913606596
Binding:
Publisher: Eyewear Publishing
Publication Date: 2022-07-01
Number of Pages: 90
Weight: 0.1700 kg
In The Scent of Spring: Elegies Out of Season, Mulhallen moves through various cities and geographies narrating elegies of loss, of cultural murder. In this poetry of atrocity, the poet is asking us to face the devastation we have wrought through war, greed, and careless inattention. But she also writes elegies radiant with love. She ends the book with the image of the West Coast Spirit Bear, ghost bear, giver of miracles, healer. We have ravaged and defaced. Now we must learn again to celebrate. - Rosemary Sullivan, Author of Stalin's Daughter: The Extraordinary and Tumultuous Life of Svetlana Alliluyeva.; Karen Muhallen has wisely chosen the elegy as the keenest instrument to bear witness to our disappearing world. With exquisite elegance and ironic humour, her logbook of things seen and unseen is an admirable, necessary memento mori for our anguished times. - Alberto Manguel
