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Carrying the Shadow
Patrick Friesen's newest collection is a haunting ode to the lives we have felt too briefly, known only in passing and yearn to hold still. While those who loved them keen softly between his lines, Friesen invokes their loss as one remembers a cool breath on the back of the neck, a faint shadow on a headstone, a watermark on the bedstand. With wisdom and beauty and invention, Friesen walks us through the graveyard of human kind where a symphony of voices still conduct the lives left behind long after they depart flesh for spirit. Intermingling prose poems and traditional free verse, Friesen both narrates and sings the stories of absence and forgetting, tales of lingering memory and fleeting love. With infinite candor and sensitivity, Friesen celebrates the lives of idols and iconoclasts, wives and widows, farmers and freeloaders. For anyone who has urged another title in the canon of Friesen's award-winning work, here is a collection worthy of accolade. Death has no dominion, but poetry has dominion over all.
We are Here
When his collection Grundstof, from which most of the poems in We Are Here hail, was published in 2004, it was welcomed in one of Denmark's most widely read newspapers Ekstra Bladet with these words: "Niels Hav is an economical writer. He only inconveniences the public when he has something important on his mind. Hav's aim is to give weight to every word and to cut to the bone. It's been ten years since his last book, but when he finally does publish what's on the page actually says something. Grundstof's words are saturated with experience and wisdom."The English translations of his poems in We Are Here are no different: they address what Hav considers to be elemental about life, that undeniable essence without which everything makes little sense. His voice is direct and humorous, intelligent, lyrical and philosophical: a voice that takes into account the difficulties of staying close to the elemental. Hav is devoid of sly obfuscation; he is a poet unafraid of being clear. What could be more direct or elemental than the fact that We Are Here?
The Breath You Take from the Lord
An elegant new collection from the author of A Broken Bowl - shortlisted for the Governor General's Award for Poetry.
The Shunning
The story of one man struggling to express his personal views within a society that demands conformity.Peter is trying to live a good life, a faithful life. When he begins to question the doctrine of his Mennonite church and his faith in general, he is ostracized from the community. A decree by the church forces his wife to abandon him if not in person, then in spirit. The strain of domestic and community pressures forces Peter deeper into isolation, but he still refuses to stop questioning. Integrating dance, text and tragedy, The Shunning blends movement and spoken word that will carry you through a sea of emotions.
You Don't Get to be a Saint
You Don’t Get to Be a Saint is a sharp-edged collage full of the echoes of human movement and voice“Patrick Friesen is one of the poets we can’t do without.”—Dennis Lee
Jumping the Asylum
"Wide-ranging in subject, deeply intuitive and layered in style, influenced equally by the cadences of jazz and by the Bible, the poems in jumping in the asylum will stand out among this distinguished author's strongest work"--Publisher.
A Dark Boat
'A Dark Boat', a new collection of poetry by Patrick Friesen, is heavily influenced by 'cante jondo' (Spanish "deep song", or flamenco) and 'fado' (Portuguese songs of longing). Friesen approaches music as a method of weaving his poems with both Spanish and Portuguese aspects of longing, imagistic leaps, and darkness.The poems in 'A Dark Boat' try to shake hands with darkness; the kind of darkness that is rich and necessary for a full human life, the darkness of soil into which seeds drop and grow, the darkness of the grave into which the body is lowered. They explore the kind of loneliness and yearning that is contained in the Portuguese word 'saudad:' a longing for something in the past th...
Moments of Happiness
"There are no words for it," the final line states in the poem, "If You're Lucky." There are no words for it, for the silence. Yet, it speaks. There are no words for the depth of experience, yet many words are used to suggest what it might be, what moments of happiness, sadness, loss and love--the important things--feel like in lives destined for demise. Whether in longer poems or the briefest, Hav invites a reader to consider along with him the feeling of existence, its inevitable joy, sorrow, noise, silence, not in binary terms but as mixtures. We took up his invitation as translators and now invite you to join us and him to enter the space he has created to ponder the important things. Poetry.
