Quarrels
CBC Books | | Posted: April 8, 2019 6:53 PM | Last Updated: July 8, 2019
Eve Joseph
The poems in this collection reach for something other than truth, the marvelous. Leaves fall out of coat sleeves, Gandhi swims in Burrard Inlet. The poems are like empty coats from which the inhabitants have recently escaped, leaving behind images as clues to their identity. There are leaps between logics within the poems, and it is in these illogical spaces where everything comes together, like the uplift of the conductor's hand to begin a piece of music where, as Arvo Part put it, the potential of the whole exists. (From Anvil Press)
Quarrels is Eve Joseph's third book of poetry.
Quarrels won the $65,000 Griffin Poetry Prize.
From the book
The capon exploded out of the pressure cooker and stuckin
the kitchen ceiling. It hung there like a black chandelier. People took turns trying to
pull it out with no success. Its charred head poked out of the roof and acted as
a weather vane. The wind polished it until it gleamed like a well-worn doorknob. We
adjusted to the smell of burnt bones and set the table as usual. In the 9th Century,
Pope Nicholas decreed that a cock had to top every church steeple in Europe. Our
home was a holy place. We worshipped all that crawled. All that flew.
From Quarrels by Eve Joseph ©2018. Published by Anvil Press