 |
|
|
Coming to Canada
1992
|
|
This collection of nearly 60
poems includes the key "Coming to Canada" sequence
and New Poems, and is supplemented with selections
from two previous volumes, Others
and Intersect.
Among the finest writers in
the world, Carol Shields has won a large and loyal
audience as a witty, compassionate and insightful
novelist, short story writer, playwright and poet.
|
 |
Although Shields'
most recent volume comes almost two decades after its
predecessor, Shields bridges the gap there too, for
the poems of all three volumes, Others (1972),
Intersect (1974) and Coming to Canada (1992),
demand to be read together. Although each poem is a
whole unto itself, it is also part of a larger poetic
vision, one that requires an honest interconnection
of its poems as much as it did of its various characters.
The poems intersect as moments do: they complement,
repudiate, or confirm each other, but they need each
other to complete the vision."
- Katharine Nicholson
Ings,
Illuminating the Moment,
Verbal Tableaux in Carol Shields Poetry
from Carol Shields: The
Arts of a Writing Life
|
 Read
Excerpts
 GETTING
Getting
older we take
chances
with this useful love.
Like skaters turning
and pirouetting
on a winter lake
seen at a distance,
we've been learning
the double trick of balance
and indifference.
I/MYSELF
A moment of no importance
but there I was, three
years old, swinging on the gate
thinking (theatrical even then)
here I am, three years old
swinging on the gate
There's no choice
about this. Consciousness is a bold
weed, it grows where it wants,
sees what it wants to see
What it sees is a moment within
a moment, a voice
outside a voice
saying: here I am, three
years old, swinging on the gate
Essay
|
I was strict
with myself. I followed [Philip] Larkin's set of rules:
no pretty language. When I finished a poem, I would
ask myself the question - and this was something I had
never done in my writing before - Is this what I really
mean? I was very severe about it. I worked; when I think
of the hours I spent revising and getting it just right,
it gave me such pleasure. I felt as though I were making
these lovely little things, these little toys."
- Carol Shields,
on her five years writing poetry in the late 1960s
and early '70s.
|
The poems in Others,
Intersect, and Coming to Canada are jewels
of economy, a breeze to read, the language wakeful and
precise, and the rhymes so thoroughly enfolded that no
reviewer, Carol once mentioned, ever noticed them. They
are perfect explosions: a glance at a neighbour, a glimpse
of a boy falling asleep, or of the hole in a professor's
sock rapidly questions time, consciousness, frailty, goodness.
In Others and Intersect,
in poems like "Someone Hurrying Home" or "A Professor
We Know Who is a Compulsive Storyteller", snapshots of
friends, family, and strangers in the realistic grip of
sidewalks and clock ticks evolve into portraits of lives
lived; the theory of who we are unfolds from the easiest
idea of what we are.
But don't be fooled: we are the
houses we live in. The politician in "Member of Parliament"
will become a "mere man,/ someone/misspelled on a list"
while a friendship bridged by Christmas cards "cozied
with greetings" is not as it appears: "I loathe her...envy
clusters in her sour/ heart like rhubarb though her anger/is
relentlessly cordial". In these poems, divorce leaves
a man "half perpendicular to death" while good marriages
remember "those days/love made us liquor/ throated, made
us/madhouse fluent" even while "our limbs/trailed silent/like
lumber,/learning the way".
Marriage, children, the amazement
of disliking an old friend or the secret loneliness of
a physicist who has his hands on the entire universe -
Carol's excitement to be thinking and working, in her
late thirties, all her five children at school, livens
every line of Others and Intersect.
Years later, Coming to Canada,
written between novels, returned to childhood with poems
about learning to read, a grandmother dying ("it was hard
to be sad"), girdled aunts with "a Rinso look", and a
mother in 1945 emerging onto the back steps, apron still
on, crying out "unconditional surrender... victory, victory
and hurling/ us into the future." They are equally inquisitive
and word sharp, but also heartachingly delicate; breathed
rather than breathless, they offer the longer story of
how we are made by those around us and all the small mysteries,
such as how the moon follows us each. They include Carol's
marvellous poem about her first moment of self-consciousness,
"I/Myself".
Carol's "New Poems", included in
the Coming to Canada New and Selected, with titles such
as "Relics" and "Remembering" and "Now", are more sober,
more surfaced, shiningly realistic. Aging affords a freedom
not entirely sad, say these poems about school reunions,
a long marriage, and time, which is deftly and playfully
handled in poems about the invention of clocks, a clock
museum, and daylight savings.
Carol's poems brim with her trademark
wry intelligence and quick humour . They are glorious
"toys" as she called them, boisterous with language and
thought, and also perfectly contained - works of exquisite
crafting.
© Copyright 2009, the Carol Shields Literary Trust
Tribute
Award winning composer creates
original work for Festival of Voices
Canadian composer Randolph Peters
created a choral piece based on Shields’ writings that
premiered at the inaugural Carol Shields Symposium on
Women’s Writing: Festival of Voices, May 8-10,
2009 at The University of Winnipeg.
Peters created two pieces based
on Shields' poetry. The first is entitled Lost Things
inspired by poetry from the novel Swann, and the
second piece Curious Journeys uses four different
poems from Coming to Canada.
“There is an exciting symmetry
between the creativity of Carol Shields and that of Randolph
Peters,” said Marjorie Anderson, co-editor, with Carol,
of the Dropped Threads series. “Carol experimented
with genre, working with the novel, the short story, drama,
the essay and poetry. Having her words set to music seems
like an imaginative logical step that ties into the theme
of the festival.”
“I find Carol Shields poetry to
be clear and direct, yet deceptively simple and layered
with possibilities,” said Randolph Peters. “As I composed
the music, I enjoyed playing with the multiple interpretations
inherent in her text. My goal was to evoke a new and meaningful
experience yet, at the same time, remain consistent with
the original spirit of the poetry.”
The commissioned works are a signature
theme for the inaugural symposium and a gift to future
symposia. This work reflects how art forms inspire one
another and lead to collaborative works that create new
levels of art. -
News from UWinnipeg
|
|
|
|
