Susan Glickman on the 'wonky and tender imagination' of Canadian poet Bruce Taylor
April is National Poetry Month! To celebrate, we connected with Canadian poets and asked them what Canadian poetry book has been meaningful to them.
Susan Glickman is an American-born Canadian writer, poet and critic. She is the author of What We Carry, a critically acclaimed poetry collection that explores the human condition and its impact on identity, culture and our physical environs.
Glickman's lyric poems traverse the Earth — commemorating disappearing species and exploring the ruins of Mycenae — and gracefully poses keen questions on time and mortality.
A Canadian book of poetry that Glickman says has been meaningful to her is Facts by Bruce Taylor, published in 1998.
"A Canadian poetry book that means a lot to me is Facts by Bruce Taylor. Though it was his third book (and he has since published No End in Strangeness), it was my first encounter with Taylor's wonky and tender imagination and his distinctive voice: at once humorous, grim and beautiful. Every poem is an encounter with the familiar world gone suddenly strange, as well as an incentive to study it more closely.
Every poem is an encounter with the familiar world gone suddenly strange, as well as an incentive to study it more closely.
"Now, in April, I appreciate 'The first banjo chords of spring after that endless/ fugue on the hydraulic organ' though all too soon we will experience summer when 'the cooked air/ blackens like a fuse.' Facts is full of such startling felicities of language; reading it, 'Thought stops. Distillates of what you were/ quietly infiltrate the aquifer.'"
