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The mythic community created within these poems is populated with larger-than-life characters: lovers, murderers, musicians, and muses. Winner of the Archibald Lampman Award for Poetry, Whylah Falls has inspired a drama, a stage play, and a feature film, One Heart Broken into Song. This Tenth Anniversary Edition includes "Apocrypha" - a section of previously unpublished poems - and an introduction by Clarke.
Where Beauty Survived by George Elliott Clarke Pdf
A vibrant, revealing memoir about the cultural and familial pressures that shaped George Elliott Clarke’s early life in the Black Canadian community that he calls Africadia, centred in Halifax, Nova Scotia. As a boy, George Elliott Clarke knew that a great deal was expected from him and his two brothers. The descendant of a highly accomplished lineage on his paternal side—great-grandson to William Andrew White, the first Black officer (non-commissioned) in the British army—George felt called to live up to the family name. In contrast, his mother's relatives were warm, down-to-earth country folk. Such contradictions underlay much of his life and upbringing—Black and White, country and city, outstanding and ordinary, high and low. With vulnerability and humour, George shows us how these dualities shaped him as a poet and thinker. At the book’s heart is George’s turbulent relationship with his father, an autodidact who valued art, music and books but worked an unfulfilling railway job. Bill could be loving and patient, but he also acted out destructive frustrations, assaulting George’s mother and sometimes George and his brothers, too. Where Beauty Survived is the story of a complicated family, of the emotional stress that white racism exerts on Black households, of the unique cultural geography of Africadia, of a child who became a poet, and of long-kept secrets.
George Elliott Clarke's newest dramatic poem, Trudeau, makes an irreverent, jubilant portrait of the life and politics of one of Canada's most controversial political heroes, Pierre Elliott Trudeau. Clarke's poem provides a whimsical and informative look at the balance of world powers in the 1960s and 70s, infused with the spirit of the many revolutions taking place throughout the world during these years. The poem opens on a hillside in Nanjing, China, April 1949, in the midst of the country's civil war. Our hero exchanges political stances with Mao and falls for a beautiful young flautist. From China the drama moves to Fredericton, NB, where Trudeau chats with Massachusetts Senator and future American president John F. Kennedy, who has just received an honorary doctorate from the university. The two men cavalierly discuss the perks of political power, each on the cusp of leading their countries. Then, in Havana, on the eve of the Bay of Pigs invasion, Fidel Castro treats Trudeau to rum and cigars and offers his take on revolutions, Cuban and otherwise. When the focus moves to the Quiet Revolution and Trudeau's response to this crisis in his leadership, Clarke presents a leader at once loved and loathed at home, who perseveres through both political and personal upheaval. Originally composed as the libretto for a new opera by D.D. Jackson to be presented at Toronto's Harbourfront Festival in April 2007, Trudeau is a political caper, an extravagant portrait and a dramatic study of influence, power, revolution and liberation. Clarke injects the life of one of this country's most intriguing personalities with the exuberance and grimy frankness his readers have come to love and expect. According to the author: "As a teenage poet in the 1970s, seven artist-intellectuals-or poet-politicos-helped me to conceive my voice. They were jazz trumpeter Miles Davis, troubadour-bard Bob Dylan, libertine lyricist Irving Layton, guerilla leader and poet Mao Zedong, reactionary modernist Ezra Pound, Black Power orator Malcolm X and the Right Honourable Pierre Elliott Trudeau. These 'idols' inspired me to sculpt an individualist poetic scored with implicit social commentary. Yes, this 'Gang of Seven' is flawed. But, taken as a whole, I find their blunt talk, suave styles, acerbic independence, raunchy macho, feisty lyricism, singing heroics and scarf-and-beret chivalry quite, well, liberating. "For me, no Canadian stood more for liberation than Trudeau, that aloof populist, rights-trampling democrat and tax-and-spend millionaire. An operatic figure in life (1919-2000), he now merits dramatic treatment. My dramatic poem imagines the politician as 'player': Plato meets Chaplin."
Gaspereau Press' best-selling title, Execution Poems, is George Elliott Clarke's complex lament for his late cousins, George and Rue - two Black men who were hanged for the murder of a taxi driver. After the overwhelming interest generated by the original limited letterpress edition of Execution Poems, Gaspereau Press released this trade edition which went on to win Canada's highest literary honour in 2001. The jurors of the Governor General's Literary Award called this book "raging, gristly, public - and unflinchingly beautiful," and remarked on Clarke's "explosive, original language." In 1949, George and Rufus Hamilton were hanged for the murder of a taxi driver in Fredericton, New Brunswick. Fifty years later, Clarke has written, in his abundant style, a series of poems that embody both damnation and redemption, offering convoluted triumphs alongside tragedy and blurring the line between perpetrator and victim. What Clarke presents in Execution Poems is uncomfortable. He reminds us of racism and poverty; of their brutal, tragic results. He reminds us of society's vengefulness. He blurs the line between the perpetrator and the victim - a line we'd prefer remain simple and clear. At the heart of it, Clarke is frustrating the notion that society deals any better with these issues today than it did in the 1940s.
By all accounts, the bludgeoning murder in 1949 of a taxi driver by brothers George and Rufus Hamilton was a slug-ugly" crime. George and Rue were hanged for it. Repelled and intrigued by his ancestral cousins’ deeds, George Elliott Clarke uncovered a story of violence, poverty and shame -- a story that led first to the Governor General’s Award–winning Execution Poems and culminated in Clarke’s brilliant and darkly comic debut novel. Named an editor’s choice by The Bookseller in the UK, George & Rue is a book about death that brims with fierce vitality and the sensual, rhythmic beauty that so often defines Clarke’s writing.
George Elliott Clarke's Québécité is a three-act multicultural romance set in modern-day Quebec. It tells the story of two interracial couples whose blossoming relationships expose the perils and possibilities of loving across racial and cultural lines. Québécité is an expanded, poetic rendering of a libretto George Elliott Clarke wrote at the request of the Guelph Jazz Festival, with music composed by Juno award-winning pianist D.D. Jackson. The opera will debut in Guelph during this year's festival (September 3 to 7) with a cast including Haydain Neale, Kiran Ahluwalia, Yoon Choi and Dean Bowman. As Clarke writes in his prelude: "This libretto is for connoisseurs. Its stanzas were sculpted of the aggravated gravitas of Miles Davis's trumpet, the scalacious solace of James Brown's howls, the fearless laissez-faire of Oscar Peterson's piano, and the oceanic négritude of Portia White's contralto. I confess: it is also a callaloo confection -- or gumbo concoction -- of Alfred Hitchcock's I Confess (1953) and films by Marcel Camus, Jacques Demy and Mira Nair. Given these traditions, plus my own tendencies, eccentricities, affinities -- lugubrious, lubricious, lubricated -- this production accepts that History is a slaughterhouse, Poetry is an opera house, and that only Love allows us to distinguish Beauty from its exinguishing." "Opera has always been about grand-scale gestures, about excess, about staging the spectacular. Throw jazz into the mix and what you get is [...] a gumbo concoction: one where hope and imagination rainbow over orthodoxy, where improvisation and the capacity to dream reinvigorate our commitment to new understandings of identity, belonging, and collective social responsibility." -- Ajay Heble in the Canadian Theatre Review
Lush Dreams, Blue Exile by George Elliott Clarke Pdf
These poems range from a personal evocation of Black Nova Scotian history to an intense, intimate response to world events in the last thirty years. All are "fugitive poems" evolving from 1979 to 1991.
The Quest for a 'national' Nationalism: E.J. Pratt's Epic Ambition, 'race' Consciousness, and the Contradictions of Canadian Identity by George Elliott Clarke Pdf
In his 2018 Pratt Lecture, The Quest for a 'National' Nationalism, renowned author and critic George Elliott Clarke investigates E.J. Pratt's poetic attempt to become the epic poet of Canada. And while Pratt's epic poems, such as Brebeuf and His Brethren and Towards the Last Spike, stand as lofty poetic achievements, the poet is never able to escape his own identity and speak convincingly for all Canadians. Unable to speak for Francophones, Indigenous peoples, and People of Colour, Pratt becomes the epic poet of the establishment, but never truly of the people. The PRATT LECTURES were established in 1968 to commemorate the legacy of E.J. Pratt. Over the years, the series has hosted a litany of world-renowned authors and scholars, including Northrop Frye, Seamus Heaney, Helen Vendler, and Dionne Brand.
On "A Girl Like This Might Have Loved Glenn Gould": "The poem sits up at its greasy-spoon counter and recounts its tale, a kind of cryptic plain-speech, an inverted code, all the more puzzling for what it plainly says: 'Under a spell so the wrong ones can't find it, / So can't get saved, ' as Robert Frost said." -- Jeffery Donaldson Absorbed in the small, everyday rituals of existence, this remarkable collection of poems tears open the fruit of life and scoops out beauty and joy, pain and suffering, in equal measure. Ritual Lights takes the reader on a journey through an underworld that is both familiar and uncanny, a space between death and life where one nourishes the other. Shadowed by the aftermath of sexual assault, Joelle Barron places candles in the darkest alcoves, illuminates mysteries, and rises again to an abundant Earth where the darkness is transformed into rich loam. These poems follow the speaker through grieving and loss, heartbreak, repression, and discovery, seeking, never finding an answer, but finding meaning in the work of continuing. A meditation on trauma and identity, deeply vulnerable and reserved, funny and full of rage, Ritual Lights explores the sometimes messy and ugly, but always necessary, nature of survival.
The poems in Gold glitter. From the lush, unrestrained and unabashed tumble and thrust of his sensual lyrics (vivid expressions of love and lust which brook no admonishment) to the measured and stately resonance of his eulogies for community organizers, tributes to leaders and laureates, and contemplations on the principles for good governance, George Elliott Clarke strives to enact Robinson Jeffers's assertion that "Beauty. . . Is the sole business of poetry." Whether it be in the whiskey-hue of skin or the metal of the love in one's heart, the poems in Gold riff on the colour's cultural and poetic properties, joining Blue, Black, and Red as the fourth volume in Clarke's series of 'colouring' books.
Just start your engine. Go. Carl Black is an intellectual and artist, a traveller, a reader and an unapologetic womanizer. A motorcyclist. He burns for the bohemian life, but is trapped in a railway porter’s prosaic—at times humiliating—existence. Taking place over one dramatic year in Halifax, Nova Scotia, The Motorcyclist vividly recounts Carl’s travels and romantic exploits as he tours the backroads of the east coast and the bedrooms of a series of beautiful women. Inspired by the life of George Elliott Clarke’s father, the novel tells the story of a black working-class man caught between the expectations of his times and gleaming possibilities of the open road. In vibrant, energetic, sensual prose, George Elliott Clarke brilliantly illuminates the life of a young black man striving for pleasure, success and, most of all, respect.
The long-awaited new work from one of Canada's leading intellectuals and poets, Black is a brilliant and fiery look at race and culture. Its genesis is Clark's time at Duke University in the late '90s; that experience unleashed political and personal outrage. This poetry is white-hot with honesty and anger. It is shocking, transgressive-and ultimately transforming."Whylah Falls is a scintillating display of language. Clarke skillfully weaves together the mythic tapestry of his African-American Loyalist community, the Bible, blues, black argot, the whole spectrum of poetry both classical and modern dance together with the energy of a Stravinsky symphony." --Toronto Star
George Elliott Clarke brings his lyrical brilliance to this personal story, an ode to his great-aunt, the internationally celebrated opera contralto Portia White. From her early years in Halifax to her performance before Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II in 1964, the trailblazing, music-filled life of White is celebrated in this stirring tribute, with illustrations from artist Lara Martina.
Before Guy Gavriel Kay became known for his groundbreaking works of speculative fiction, establishing himself as one of the world's most respected writers in that genre, he was an accomplished poet, his work appearing in major literary journals such as The Antigonish Review and Prism. Through the years, while writing his dramatic international bestsellers, Kay has continued to quietly explore the paths and boundaries of poetry as well. Now for the first time, Guy Gavriel Kay's poetry has been gathered and selected for publication. For those familiar with his fiction, the poems in Beyond This Dark House will resonate for their linguistic and emotional nuances and their mythological allusions, echoing and illuminating themes of his fiction. But readers of contemporary poetry will also be captivated by the exquisite craft and power of these poems. Some are ironic and austere, slyly tracing the interplay of writer and world, present and past; others are sensual, even erotic, charting the mercurial but abiding nature of passion-in love, in language, in history.