Poetry Parlour

See what Leaguers have to say about what they’ve been reading, naming collections and more!

Thank you to everyone who responded to the most recent Poetry Pause questions! Check out our new batch of questions.

Tell us about your favourite book of poetry that you read 2022:

Dagne Forrest: I absolutely adored Honorifics by Cynthia Miller. A debut collection, it’s very assured, exploring cultural identity, immigration, and family through a delightfully eclectic range of images and forms. It’s the kind of collection I find myself returning to regularly.

Daniel G Scott: Exculpatory Lilies by Susan Musgrave - astonishing journey through death and loss with uncanny insight and courage. The craft embodied is stunning.

Amanda Earl: Bluest Nude by Ama Codjoe. Many of the poems center around Black women as seen in art. These are very strong poems with excellent imagery. I have re - turned to several of the poems and read them again. Also Magnolia, 木蘭 by Nina Mingya Powles. A gift to a synaesthete. Full of colour and sensory detail. Culture, food, language, China. I loved this collection of poems so much, I’ll have to reread again. Slowly.

Andrea Martineau: Little House Wolf by Medrie Purdham. It is delightful, thoughtful, and wise, while still channeling the perplexing and creative way a child views the world.

Anne Burke: That would be playing favourites among my poet friends, so an unfairness arises. In general, I read poetry for pleasure (mine and others).

Honey Novick: Mother, the Verb Swan Sisters Treasure Book by Linda Rogers van Krugel.

Paul Edward Costa: My favourite book of poetry that I read this past year Me, You, Then Snow by Khashayar Mohammadi (Gordon Hill Press). I really enjoyed how smoothly they weave together conversational tones, poetic symbolism, pop-culture, and personal exploration. It doesn’t feel forced or like various different approaches clashing. To make these aspects mesh takes tremendous skill and creativity. nan williamson: the curator of silence by Jude Nutter. beautiful, intimate, musical lished a few years back. So , I have a few, but Mary Oliver’s book House of Light is one that’s still in a place I can reach without thinking.

Jennifer Cox: Shadow Blight.

Cheryl Antao-Xavier: World Poetry--an anthology of poetry from antiquity to our time; Eds. Katherine Washburn and John S. Major; 1998. One of several prized possessions. Is to be buried or cremated with me, so I can continue picking through it for inspiration in style and form.

Stephen Kent Roney: True Confessions, I.B. Iskov.

D.A. Lockhart: Jim Harrison’s Complete Poems. It’s a bit of a cheat, yes. Because it is an entire career’s worth of the work. And work from a literary master. One that covers much of the physical spaces I inhabited in both Michigan and Montana. These are touchstones to a shared world with a man I never met. Yet on that blazed a literary and lyric trail that I follow to this day.

Kamal Parmar: I have recently read a poetry book titled, Milk and Honey by Rupi Kaur. The poems are poignant and thought provoking.

How did you choose the title of your most recent poetry collection?

Cheryl Antao-Xavier: I grew up in a country where the bulbul was an incessant chirper, invasive nester, and generally regarded as an ubiquitous disturber of the peace. They became targets of slingshots to disperse them. My next collection of poems reflects the unwitting irritant that alien species of humans, birds, environmental degradating factors etc. have on normal, regular, ‘the usual’. So excited about this.

Stephen Kent Roney: I named it after a doomed love affair.

Dianne Joyce: I have been reading books new to me that were pub -

Kamal Parmar: My latest poetry collection is titled, ‘Just passing by.’ As a nature lover, I often walk or hike on trails leading among the forests, going uphill and downhill to find a beautiful hidden brook beside wild bulrushes. It is in these moments that a few lines come to mind that fill me with a sacred stillness. So, I thought that the ti- tle resonated very well with the source of inspiration that connects me with the Muse.

Andrea Martineau: Kirby pins is another name for bobby pins. These tiny hair pieces act as messages between two starcrossed lovers.

Dianne Joyce: The title of my most recent collection, is a name that came after reading a book on Feng Shui. It’s a special energy that comes with the placement of things. Perfect for my purposes, but I’ll keep the name to myself. That said, the title of my recent chapbook is ORBIT. For years I seem to be orbiting around the same ideas, but failing to write about them. These poems arrived first as part of the larger collection and revolve around the poem Orbit, and are connected to an art piece of mine.

Anne Burke: Most poetry collections choose me to be better understood than most.

D.A. Lockhart: The title is a folksy take on claiming the south shore of Waawiiyaatanong (Windsor, ON) for it’s original and generally unrecognized land keepers the Odawa people. It plays with the musicality of the pieces and a homage to the rich musical heritage of both shores of Waawiiyaatanong.

Paul Edward Costa: The most recent manuscript I put together is titled “Vigils of the Night Office” I always loved the phrase “The Night Office” when studying Medieval

History at York University (from the book “The Rule of St. Benedict”). These vigils are nighttime prayers for Benedictine monks. The poems are separated by category and each section is considered one of the “Vigils” of the book. I like the idea of poems as a kind of prayers for the night.

Honey Novick: I sought out my heart’s feelings and then prayed for the courage to share that nan williamson: “leave the door open for the moon” is my chapbook title. Many of my poems had a moon image and I also meant be open to beauty, wonder… ed my way through several different titles as the shape and nature of the collection have changed over the last year. This sounds like a question I should revisit in the future! Just for fun: If your poetry was a means of travel, which would it be and why?

Daniel G Scott: By editing a longer title and worrying the whole time that it needed something else. Travels with Athóma says enough.

Amanda Earl: My forthcoming poetry book is entitled Beast Body Epic. I knew the title almost as soon as I began drafting the manuscript in 2012/2013. It concerns the journey that began with my neardeath health crisis in 2009 and engages with the monstrousness of the feminine body, and is a feminist anti-epic. I thought of Dante’s Divine Comedy, especially Inferno, the monstrous feminine and the body undergoing pain, trauma, surgeries.

Honey Novick: Poetry is my means of travel by flight. When I need sustenance, I call forth the wings of poetry and when they appear, I fly to worlds transformed by imagination and remembrance.

Andrea Martineau: It would be a subway -- sometimes messy and rough around the edges, but quickly takes you from point A to point B.

Dagne Forrest: I tend to think I would choose a means of conveyance that is slow and deliberate, as much of my poetry is very grounded in a form of enquiry that requires a bit of patience, and yet my love of exploring a large range of topics, including physics and the cosmos, makes flight also seem essential. I wonder if a glider might make sense!

Dagne Forrest: I’m still working on a first collection and have navigat-

Anne Burke: When the caterpillar is full grown it becomes a pupa called a chrysalis, either suspended, hidden or buried; inside a cocoon of silk. The monarch migrates long distances evanescent and splendorous. For all the body is shed and the new body appears with beautiful nearly transparent wings. Then that metamorphosis means flight for a butterfly, however briefly, until the cycle of life begins again.

Jennifer Cox: Bicycle or train.

Dianne Joyce: It would be a spaceship, of course. So I could get a look at the big picture and gain some clarity. Besides, I was up there once in the great beyond travelling at the speed of light in a hypnagogic spacescape. It was amazing!

Amanda Earl: My poetry is a long, slow thoughtful lifelong walk. I find my poems by walking. Travel is a late 14th C. word that meant to toil, to labour. My mind is my means of travel but a long walk will always get my synapses going. If I could run, I’d run lines by foot and breaks with my breath.

Stephen Kent Roney: It is a means of travel. It is a magic carpet.

Paul Edward Costa: If my poetry was a means of travel, it would be an extremely durable and sturdy pair of boots whose wear and tear has given it a tone that is, in other places, artificially crafted and sold for high prices in such a state. These boots don’t give you superhuman speed or flight but they will let you keep walking steadily when the heroes have fallen and the speedsters have tripped on their own runaway momentum. nan williamson: in the cradle of the crescent moon

Cheryl Antao-Xavier: Plane first. Car (after my catarract operation in March).

Daniel G Scott: Flight but not in a vehicle, just flying. I think the spirit can soar and sink in poetry but it is language that gives wings to felts and thoughts.

Kamal Parmar: If poetry was a means of travel, it would be the poetic Muse in the form of dreams that are seamless and beyond imagination.

D.A. Lockhart: Car, most likely a 2000 Ford Ranger Flare Side. Rear wheel drive so as to reach optimal continental drift speeds cutting across I-80 through Nebraska, Iowa, and into the Rockies. Perhaps floating through the hills of southern Indiana, on the look out for wildcats and paw paws. Thelonius Monk tapping out the distance on his piano the entire time.

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