Poetry Bundle 4: Art meets Art

Get more NeWest books for less with our NeWest bundles! This bundle includes: let us not think of them as barbarians by Peter Midgley et us not think of them as barbarians is a bold narrative of love, migration, and war hewn from the stones of Namibia. Sensual and intimate, these evocative poems fold into each other to renew and undermine multiple poetic traditions. These poems call out as an act of linguistic and cultural translation that gradually assembles an ombindi—an ancestral cairn—from a history of violent disruption. Underlying the intense language is an exploration of African philosophy and its potential for changing our view of the world. Even as the poems look to the past, they push the reader towards a future that is as relevant to contemporary Canada as it is to the Namibian earth that bled them. A Revision of Forward by Wendy Mcgrath By turns tender and rough-hewn, and always structurally inventive, the poems in Wendy McGrath’s new collection show a writer reaching the height of her creative powers. Whether evoking the vulgar give-and-take of a men’s poker night, fleeting moments of connection between mothers and sons, afternoons spent in overgrown backyard gardens, or wondrous childhood trips to the drive-in, McGrath’s feel for the bygone details of working-class life is uncanny. The book’s highlight is the playful poetic sequence that gives the book its title, the product of a more-than-decade-long improvisational collaboration with printmaker Walter Jule, a series of not-quite-mirror poems whose meanings reflect on each other in kaleidoscopic ways. Tar Swan by David Martin • Shortlisted for the 2019 Raymond Souster Award! • Finalist for the City of Calgary W.O. Mitchell Book Prize! • Winner for Book Design at the 2019 Alberta Book Publishing Awards! Tar Swan is a multi-voiced reckoning that surveys the mythos of the Alberta oil sands with an approach that is both lyrical and experimental. The poems feature four voices: an oil sands developer, his plant mechanic, an archaeologist excavating the remains of the operation in the present day, and a mythical swan. David Martin’s debut collection is comprised of expansive and richly written poems, built on a lore-laden language, which explore the human and environmental cost of drawing too much from the land. As the three humans come into contact with the otherworldly swan, the voices bubble and churn together, and what is distilled is a psychological breakdown paralleling the toll taken on the earth.