Books

Writing non-fiction’s a bitch – a truth not universally acknowledged.

– Will Aitken in This Writing Death

Theatre

Ars Poetica



by Anna Fuerstenberg

Comment

What an interestingly inviting read on this mind muddled morning. Thanks! Coffee, Please?

– comment by Parker

Posts by author:

Roger Sauls

BOOKS

A Collection So Rich

Thumbnail image for A Collection So Rich

Fine Incisions, by Eric Ormsby, The Porcupine’s Quill

by Roger Sauls
20.03.2011

To be a poet-critic in the 21st century, especially one espousing the values of the western intellectual tradition, is to be in the line of an apostolic succession that has run out of heirs.  The line last thrived in the mid-20th century when figures like T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, and Randall Jarrell reigned [...]

[...]

BOOKS

The Insurgent Margaret Avison

Thumbnail image for The Insurgent Margaret Avison

The Essential Margaret Avison, selected by Robyn Sarah, Porcupine’s Quill

by Roger Sauls
23.11.2010

If there is a theology of poetry, it holds that the poem transcends the poet, that the poem retains its central qualities regardless of the poet’s human flaws.  The poet concerned with theology, however, is required to produce work that is less forgiving of deviation.  In general, it must see subject matter through a narrow [...]

[...]

BOOKS

Variations of the Elegiac Memory

Thumbnail image for Variations of the Elegiac Memory

Indexical Elegies, by Jon Paul Fiorentino, Coach House Press

by Roger Sauls
11.10.2010

When poetry’s relation to consciousness was configured as a linear construct, a concurrent understanding of the poem was that it embodied a concordance between the language of the creative impulse and the real world into which the poetry was cast.  The aim was to achieve a harmony of results between the two arenas. Over time, [...]

[...]

BOOKS

When the Circus Has Left Town

Thumbnail image for When the Circus Has Left Town

Circus, by Michael Harris, Signal Editions

by Roger Sauls
21.07.2010

In Federico Fellini’s early Realist film, La Strada, he uses a provincial carnival troupe as a vehicle to explore the performer’s mask, especially what he shows as the contradictions inherent in the lives of those who assume false faces for the amusement of strangers.  The strong man of the troupe, played with great sensitivity by [...]

[...]

BOOKS

The Dignity of Deep Love

Thumbnail image for The Dignity of Deep Love

Lookout, by John Steffler, McClelland & Stewart

by Roger Sauls
31.05.2010

John Steffler is the kind of poet who likes to burrow into a landscape’s least beautiful recesses. Once inside, he’s an unusual tenant, his impulses anything but those of a mystic. When he’s in the kind of terrain that inspires his poems—the rock-strewn topography of Newfoundland, say, or the coasts of the Maritime Provinces—he inhabits [...]

[...]

BOOKS

A Worthy Confession

Thumbnail image for A Worthy Confession

I Do Not Think That I Could Love a Human Being, Johanna Skibsrud, Gaspereau Press

by Roger Sauls
05.04.2010

According to Chekhov, the listening ear of a horse is receptive to confession, even to the most woebegone among us — especially in cases where humans won’t listen.  In his story “Misery,” a cabby, grief-stricken by the death of his son, can’t find sympathy among his passengers; he finds his waiting mare the only open [...]

[...]

BOOKS

Conferring Grace on the Materials at Hand

Thumbnail image for Conferring Grace on the Materials at Hand

Pause for Breath, by Robyn Sarah, Biblioasis

by Roger Sauls
17.01.2010

The American poet George Oppen liked to cite the carpenter’s art as a useful model for the construction of a poem. He argued that a poem’s parts, when properly connected, constitute a structure of both shapeliness and utility–a ladderback chair, say.  The beauty of Oppen’s simile is that it places the poem in the broad [...]

[...]

Page 1 of 212