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

Celebrating Al Purdy

Today is the 10th anniversary of the day that Al Purdy, one of Canada's most celebrated poets, succumbed to cancer and died in North Saanich, B.C, at the age of 81.

We feel it is only appropriate, particularly since it is National Poetry Month, to highlight his life and accomplishments on a day that has since been named "Al Purdy Day" in Canada.

Purdy published his first poem when he was 13 years old, and learned right away that poetry was not going to be a lucrative career -- he earned a dollar.

Unlike many poets, Purdy didn’t hit his stride until his 40s. It wasn't until 1965, at the age of 47, that Purdy won his first Governor General's Award for his book of poetry The Cariboo Horses. But throughout his life he was driven to write, and write he did. All told he published 33 books of poetry, several essays, a novel, and a two-volume memoir.

As a tribute, here's an adaptation of one of Purdy's most famous poems, At the Quinte Hotel. The short film stars The Tragically Hip's Gord Downie, and is narrated by the poet himself.



To learn more about Al Purdy, or the Purdy A-frame project, which is raising funds to purchase Purdy’s former property and establish a poet-in-residence program, please visit the following website: http://www.harbourpublishing.com/PurdyAFrame/index.html

You may also want to check out The Ivory Thought: Essays on Al Purdy from the University of Ottawa Press.