M&S Poetry Launch: Dionne Brand, Paul Vermeersch, and John Steffler

Come and join in celebrating the launch of these three new collections of poetry from McClelland & Stewart.

OSSUARIES by Dionne Brand, Toronto's Poet Laureate.

Dionne Brand's mesmerizing new collection of poems is about human zoos in the contemporary world, about the bones of fading cultures and ideas, about putting these bones away even as Brand examines their textures of powder and stone, their resilience. There are multiple strands in Ossuaries — the narrative of a woman fleeing, the sorting of the bones, the museums of spectacle that the poet visits collecting them, and the search for their final place — and always the political urgency and incantatory lyric intensity for which Brand is justly celebrated.

THE REINVENTION OF THE HUMAN HAND by Paul Vermeersch

Paul Vermeersch’s new poems give a present-day voice to primitive song, and restore to us a dawn-time severity that cuts through modern evasions. They go beyond sophistication to reveal the passionate and suffering animal within. The Reinvention of the Human Hand is a poetry of the human body's experience, of a primal being that struggles to assert itself, or perhaps just survive, in a world of metals, plastics, electronics. Here is the most far-reaching work yet by the acclaimed author of Burn, The Fat Kid, and Between the Walls. Vermeersch has always gone in search of understanding. Now his discoveries speak of a human world exhausted by its divorce from an animal past, terrified of retreating into early places it never truly left, astonished by the forgotten possibilities disclosed there.

LOOKOUT by John Steffler, Former Poet Laureate of Canada.

The wide-ranging poems in Lookout — John Steffler's first book of new poems since his award-winning That Night We Were Ravenous (1998) — celebrate the landscape and history of western Newfoundland, which is inseparable from an exploration of the poet's own life. The poems embrace the limestone barrens on Newfoundland's Great Northern Peninsula and the poet's personal life, the end of a marriage, the beginnings of new love. There is also a series of poems about his parents' struggle to deal with his mother's Alzheimer's during the last year of her life.

For more information, please call (416) 778-1804.