Birds Art Life: A Year of Observation by Kyo Maclear
A few days ago – which will be many days ago by the time you read this – I watched robins, red-winged blackbirds, mallards, and a pair of swallows darting through shadows making them difficult to identify. Birds Art Life is a book I’ve read and re-read, in times of difficulty and in times of relative ease. It always brings me comfort.
I have been reading with fascination The Equivalents, by Maggie Doherty. It is the story of a visionary program instituted at Boston’s Radcliffe College in 1960 that was designed to rescue select, few, women of privilege from the drudgery of American housewifery.
Forster (1879-1970) is one of my favorite novelists, and I particularly like Howards End. The film version starring Emma Thompson, Anthony Hopkins and Helena Bonham-Carter is superb, and it captures some of the subtlety of perception and insight of the novel itself. The same might be said of A Room with a View, also adapted to the screen. Forster’s work shares some similarities with Virginia Woolf’s work, particularly with Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse. Both novelists are as much concerned with sensibility as with incidents, the building blocks of plot. Though both outlived the Edwardian age—Woolf died in 1941, Forster in 1970—and even though Woolf is commonly spoken of as a modernist, I think there is something Edwardian about both their sensibilities. Both treat emotional states and the shared opinions that typify particular social classes in particular historical periods almost as a painter would do—as colours, tones, atmospheres. Clearly both of them write with something of a poetic feeling.
George Elliott Clarke has carved a name for himself in Canada’s poetry landscape as a talented modernist paradoxically charged with verbosity. The richness of his language, the energy and directness of his address, and his exploration of “big” themes (racism, love, poverty) have garnered him understandable praise. In his best work, the focus of language and theme creates an undeniable force.
"Time Will Tell" by J Brooke
Excerpt
A Psalmist with Second Thoughts: The Poetry of Steven Heighton
Selected Poems 1983-2020, Steven Heighton. Anansi, 2021.
At least you’ll leave a shoe print . . .
Postscripts from a City Burning, Sam Cheuk. Palimpsest Press, 2021.
The Energy of Questions
I Am The Big Heart, Sarah Venart. Brick Books, 2020.
Surrealestate: The Quandary of Home in New Stories by Meghan Bell and Kate Cayley
Erase and Rewind, Meghan Bell. Book*hug, 2021.
Householders, Kate Cayley. Biblioasis, 2021.
The forthcoming Winter 2023 issue of The Fiddlehead is now available for pre-order!
The issue will feature the winning story from The Fiddlehead's 2022 Fiction Contest, as well as work from talented writers such as Alice Zorn, Abu Bakr Sadiq, Kate Cayley, Brian Bartlett and many more.
Pre-orders will be in the mail by the end of January. To order your copy click the appropriate link below:
