Thursday 29 November 2012

My poetry course at the University of Guelph runs from January to March

My eight-week intensive poetry writing course at the University of Guelph's Centre for Open Learning and Educational Support starts in January. There's plenty of time to register. 

Click here for details.

Tuesday 6 November 2012

I have a new poem on the website Canadian Poetries



Please visit the website Canadian Poetries to read my new poem "The Unseen World".

Here's the first stanza:

The Unseen World



There was the Hudson—more like the flash
of a sword-blade than a noble river.
The little island of Manhattan, set like a jewel
in its nest of rainbow waters, stared up into my face,
             and the solar system circled about my head!
                     —Helen Keller describing “the view” from the Empire State Building
If you are born to it, there will be no oblivion,
born from one tight womb into another,
as through a door that opens on a different
unmarked door, and then onto a room
with no walls. As though slipping from a basin
filled with ink into a Martian silence, to a depth
where you assume invisibility beneath an ocean
of no light. But look, there’s no oblivion here,
no brusque deletion, only the panic of being found,
of being touched by the limb of something
swimming near you. Don’t you see? Nothing
has been removed from your experience,
only added. First, there was the word for water.
There was the Hudson—more like the flash

Click here to read the whole poem.