Slovenly Love is M???ira Cook's third book of poetry. A Fine Grammar of Bones and Toward a Catalogue of Falling, both collections of lyrics, are now joined by a fascinating long poem composed of five sequences. A Year of Birds sensuously explores erosion of self in the gain of new life in motherhood; Blue Lines concerns a woman and her double, the imperishable self she left to become the self she is; Trawling: a biography of the river introduces Heraclitus into the Winnipeg Flood of 1997, the Red River becoming a ...
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Slovenly Love is M???ira Cook's third book of poetry. A Fine Grammar of Bones and Toward a Catalogue of Falling, both collections of lyrics, are now joined by a fascinating long poem composed of five sequences. A Year of Birds sensuously explores erosion of self in the gain of new life in motherhood; Blue Lines concerns a woman and her double, the imperishable self she left to become the self she is; Trawling: a biography of the river introduces Heraclitus into the Winnipeg Flood of 1997, the Red River becoming a river of the mind; Kiss by the H???tel de Ville, an extended meditation on varieties of dislocation between art and reality, focuses on Robert Doisneau's famous photograph of the same title; Tempestuous is a passionate, Miranda-centred reading of Shakespeare's The Tempest. Each sequence is distinct, but together they explore a life of gap, fragment, flux. Ah swift-wing???d youth, says a voice in Trawling, the world is, was, and ever will be full of wonder. Slovenly Love , in its exhilarating renovation of words and forms, gorgeously confirms that. Says she favours tattoos, impermanent as the memory of these blue lines. Hey, beautiful, throw me a line, she calls, too low to hear. Every third word slightly erased, as if blurred by a wet thumb. Always known we are lost in a long poem, fragmented to gloss memory, she says. Nevertheless, she adds, treading water, I am not as melancholy as I seem to be when that complaint escapes me. ? from Blue Lines
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