Celebrating Canadian Poetry

April is National Poetry Month, and what better way to celebrate than by curling up with the UOP’s new volume of poetry, coming out later this month.

Ricochet, by Seymour Mayne, is a collection of word sonnets – fourteen line poems with only one word per line. Though the poems are short and sweet, including a single sentence (sometimes two,) these sonnets create a world of meaning with their depth and complexity. Seymour Mayne is the author, editor or translator of more than fifty books including Les pluies de septembre (Éditions du Noroît, 2008), and Light Industry (Mosaic Press, 2000).

This bilingual edition includes a version of each poem in both French and English, which presented the additional challenge of translating the sonnets. The brave and capable translator is Sabine Huynh, a novelist, short story writer and a poet in her own right.

Here’s a look at the word sonnet Calendar and its translation. Enjoy!

Calendar

She
awoke
Monday,
it
was
April
on
the
calendar,
December
on
the
snowcovered
ground.

Le calendrier

Elle
se
réveilla
lundi,
le calendrier
indiquait
avril,
la
neige
recouvrant
le
sol,
décembre.

If you would like more information on Ricochet, check out the UOP website: http://www.press.uottawa.ca/book/ricochet

Great review in 'Journal of Popular Music Studies'

The Journal of Popular Music Studies has published a great review of Sonjah Stanley Niaah’s recent title DanceHall. The book examines the cultural significance of dancehall, a genre of popular Jamaican music. Stanley Niaah looks at the history of Dancehall music and offers the first in-depth look at the performance spaces, lifestyle and meanings that have come out of this art form.

The review is not available online, but here is some of what Stacy J. Lettman had to say:


Sonjah Stanley Niaah’s DanceHall: From Slave Ship to Ghetto offers a new approach to theorizing performance geography and presents a compelling body of research conducted over an eight-year period, from 1999 to 2007. As a theoretical framework, the book fuses together concepts from geography, sociology, and cultural studies as it explores the physical space of the dancehall, the types of events that are staged there, and the rituals that are maintained and that are linked to the experiences and practices of ghetto life—practices that can be traced back to the plantation and to the slave ship. The book offers an ambitious and exhaustive interdisciplinary study of dancehall’s performative spaces in Kingston and the wider Jamaica, spaces which are understood as not only local but also transnational, occupying/inhabiting intersecting spaces within the performative culture of the African diaspora. As the author notes, her work is a necessary intervention in a scholarly discourse that has tended to focus on dancehall’s “excesses and obsessions rather than sociocultural, spatial and historically contextualized readings” (xvi).

-- Stacy J. Lettman, Journal of Popular Music Studies

To find out more about the book, visit the UOP website: http://www.press.uottawa.ca/book/dancehall

Constance Backhouse, lauréate de la médaille David Walter Mundell 2010

Félicitations à Constance Backhouse, auteure du livre De la couleur des lois, qui a été choisie comme lauréate de la médaille David Walter Mundell pour l’année 2010. Le prix rend hommage à ceux et celles qui ont fait une contribution distinguée au droit et aux lettres.

La professeure Backhouse est une spécialiste réputée de droit au Canada qui se concentre particulièrement aux inégalités systémiques. De la couleur des lois expose la discrimination raciale du système judiciaire au Canada entre 1900 et 1950.

De la couleur des lois est la traduction française de Colour-Coded: A Legal History of Racism in Canada (University of Toronto Press, 1999), qui a été gagnant du prix Joseph Brant en 2002.

Pour en lire plus au sujet du prix, veuillez cliquer le lien suivant :
http://www.commonlaw.uottawa.ca/index.php?option=com_content&Itemid=111&id=5579&task=view&lang=fr

Pour commander le livre, visitez: http://www.presses.uottawa.ca/book/de-la-couleur-des-lois

Un dictionnaire à la hauteur des auteurs franco-ontariens

Voici une critique du Dictionnaire des écrits de l'Ontario français qui viens d'être publier dans le journal Le Goût de vivre.

Bonne lecture!

Open publication - Free publishing - More article

Book launch for Climate, Culture, Change

The book launch for Climate, Culture, Change: Inuit and Western Dialogues with a Warming North will be held this Thursday, March 3, 2011. The launch will be hosted by the Iris Speaker Series at York University in HNES 140 from 3:30 – 4:30pm.

In Climate, Culture, Change, author Timothy Leduc works to integrate the Inuit experience of climate change with western climate research. Considering alternative ways of thinking about climate change, Leduc sidelines the common debates on the validity of climate science and the economic viability of responding to climate change. Instead, he approaches current issues such as polar bear decline from both an Inuit and western viewpoint to create a more organic understanding of what is happening in the north.

For more information about the launch, visit the following link:
http://www.irisyorku.ca/irisyorku.ca/iris-speaker-series-presents-book-launch-climate-culture-change-western-and-inuit-dialogues-with-a-warming-north-by-timothy-b-leduc/