BRICK BOOKS · Zbigniew Herbert – “Stool” The yellow chair is loyal, there’s no doubt about its steadfast heart, lifted from the hardiest wood. How else could we sit here

BOOKSBRICK

SPRING 2014SAMPLER

$20

ISBN-13 • 978-1-926829-89-0ISBN -10 • 1-926829-89-1

6 X 8.75 INCHES / 112 PAGES

TRADE PAPERBACK / POETRY /

Since emigrating from the UK in 2006, JOANNA LILLEY has lived in Whitehorse, Yukon. Her poems and stories have been published in Canada and the UK in journals including The Malahat Review, Grain and The Fiddlehead. This is her first collection of poetry.

THE MIDDLE OF NOWHERE

My family won’t visit thisfaraway place of half-yearwinters, centuries of quiet,where aspen shadows dressthe snow in long blue ribbons.

My family says I’ve run away from life, couldn’t cope withbeing in the thick of it any more.How do they knowwhere is the thick, the thin?

Here, between the silent aspens, is the thick of it.Spliced by sisters,pinched between parents:there’s the thin.

YOU WERE PROBABLY GENETICALLY PROGRAMMED

to leave your parents, country,sit for hours on buses, trains,sleep on railway platforms, in cemeteries,on a beach when you could find one,once in a truck driver’s cab.

Everything you needed was in a backpackyou’d keep forever as a memento,hang on the wall until you slungit on a landfill heap greased by takeout packaging, oil.

You could have used the fabricfor a collage, the way you cut upall your paintings after college.You used to be so creative.You have no urge to travel any more,

the only thing that makes you believeyou’ve changed. It’s true you liveabroad now and life’s a journey anyhow.Your contentment to stay in one placereminds you of spring lambs.

Watching them jump and twist, you used to want one as a pet. By latesummer they’d always stop, standcropping grass beside their placid mothers,wool as grubby as your New Zealand socks.

You couldn’t tell the difference between lambs and motherswhen they were taken awayin trucks to be stunned and sliced,the husks of that expended energy

compacted into cutlets,chunked into cat and dog food.That’s the best thing about nottravelling any more:you can have pets.

$20

ISBN-13 • 978-1-926829-88-3ISBN -10 • 1-926829-88-3



JANE MUNRO is the author of five previous books of poetry. Her work has received the Bliss Carman Poetry Award and the Macmillan Prize for Poetry, and was nominated for the Pat Lowther Award. She is a member of Yoko’s Dogs, a poetry collective whose first book, Whisk, appeared in 2013. She lives in Vancouver.

The live arbutus carries dead branches

grey wood twisted tightwithin the framework of the tree –impossible to snap off,forged as it dries.

And in me, parts I can’t imagine myself without – silvering.

Healthy branches flower.Rufous hummingbirds arrive. Berries hang in clusters, fall.Strips of papery ochre skin peel awayfrom the smooth green muscle of spreading limbs.

But I know what lasts.What claims each twig is hardto carve into spoons or boxes, or burn.

How gracefully the tree holds up these swords among its branches.

Beauty the mediating principle, the moon said

between goodness and severity.

Her spinning wheel sounds like a coffee grinderbut steadier. So she’s working today. Any news of my fate?

But it shuts off: that was a shower. Pipes clankedat its closing. He said the diagnosis was like

stepping into an elevatorand finding nothing there – no floor beneath him.

Valley of the Moon

On the drive to the respite hotel, the Goldberg Variations: a bridge to peace.

Sora bidding farewell to Bashō –Sora leaning forward on his elbow.

*

In the moment of leaving,when words set sail from paper . . .

soul clingsto one burningas fire clings to a stick.

*

Even when the mind’s a sieve, soul doesn’t grieve –cannot believe

in scarcity. A mountain, a river – fully this, fully that.

•

ISBN-13 • 978-1-926829-87-6ISBN -10 • 1-926829-87-5



ARLEEN PARÉ is a poet and novelist with an MFA in Creative Writing. Her first book, Paper Trail, won the Victoria Butler Book Prize and was a finalist for the Dorothy Livesay B.C. Book Award for Poetry. Her second book, a mixed-genre novel entitled Leaving Now, was released in 2012. Paré’s writing has appeared in several Canadian literary journals and anthologies. Originally from Montreal, she lived for many years in Vancouver, and now lives in Victoria.

$20

DISTANCE CLOSING IN

f lint-dark far-off sky on the move across the lakeslant sheets closing in sky collapsing from its bowl shoreline waiting taut stones dark as plums

closer future f linging itself backwardswater now stippling thin waterskin

shallows pummelled the worldhisses with rain iron-blue smell and pewter light ringing

KANESATAKE

the reserve on the lake banners maple and oak sumac a warrior f lag the road through is knee-high grass-f lanked

northward for miles only trees and grass moving no people no dogs

your car driving nowhere you know until rain speckles the windscreen

a sense of trespass the threat of a downpour you decide to turn back

everything f lashes by in reverse rain-splattered signs maples and oaks Christmas lights at the ends of the driveways

hand-lettered signs or neon signs blinking eggs for sale fireworks cigarettes cigarettes Tabac Chez Nous and Best Butts Mohawk Gas

once a figure appeared gas station to car then a warning: we don’t collect taxes

for any foreign government

ALNÖITIC ROCK

Fits (this uncertain rock) into your hollowed hand.

Muskrat-skull rock, mauved in places as if bled.

Hole-pocked fossil rock. A cipher. Left behind

when ice plates receded. Continental sheets.

Ice on the move. Leaving what cannot cleave.

Topographies herded f lat, wide as the weft of caribou hooves.Hoof-heavy plumb of time (here and Baffin Island only).

Or volcano-spewed, dropped from the sky.

Primordial cool, old questions weight in your palm.

$20

ISBN-13 • 978-1-926829-90-6ISBN -10 • 1-926829-90-5



KAREN ENNS grew up in a Mennonite farming community in southern Ontario. She currently lives and writes in Victoria, B.C., where she works as a private piano instructor. Her first book of poetry, That Other Beauty, was nominated for the Gerald Lampert Award.

To Walk into That Beauty

To walk into that beauty

the way he walks into the barn.

Long limbs of light and purpose. Lankiness.

And something else: as if it costs him.

As if to ride the arm of heat

coming from the burnt-out fields

is a matter of fidelity.

Only that.

To enter raw and squinting,

measuring the dark,

knowing where everything is.

Yellow Chair

At last the fidelity of things opens our eyes. Zbigniew Herbert – “Stool”

The yellow chair is loyal, there’s no doubt

about its steadfast heart,

lifted from the hardiest wood.

How else could we sit here day after day,

shifting our weight from leg to leg?

La cathédrale engloutie

A haze hangs over the streets,

an impression of light.

But there’s a magnificent pull

in the way its being here is also

its abandoning.

Of us. Our small lives.

This may have been what Debussy imagined,

a cathedral rising from the water.

Streaming bells and weight,

columns of sound

becoming shimmer, octave ballast

working up to transformation

and then distance, filigree.

We may have had a sense of this

in the Place Dauphin

as we sat under the plane trees in late afternoon,

the leaves slowly falling on us.

So early, we marvelled, in July.

Or was it not late afternoon but evening?

Were the cafes almost closing?

Except for the leaves,

nothing was moving.

Pianissimo.

Above the lawn, circles of flies,

almost transparent, pelt themselves

into the static air.

CONTACT INFORMATION

For course adoptions, review copies, or permission to reprint poems from Brick Books’ titles in anthologies, journals, etc., please contact Brick Books directly.

BRICK BOOKS 431 Boler Road, Box 20081London, Ontario N6K 4G6email / [email protected] / www.brickbooks.ca

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BRICK BOOKS · Zbigniew Herbert – “Stool” The yellow chair is loyal, there’s no doubt about its steadfast heart, lifted from the hardiest wood. How else could we sit here