FEATURED BOOK | NEW BOOKS | AUTHOR EVENTS

Be sure also to visit the BuschekBooks WIKI, where our authors and collaborators post reviews, readings and other pertinent information.

October 21, 2008, Ottawa, ON – Aide-Mémoire by Ruth Roach Pierson has been nominated for the 2008 Governor General’s Award for Poetry as announced by the Canada Council for the Arts. The other nominees in this category are: Weyman Chan (Noise from the Laundry), A. F. Moritz (The Sentinel), Sashiko Murakami (The Invisibility Exhibit), and Jacob Scheier (More to Keep Us Warm).

Pierson’s Aide-Mémoire explores themes originating in the dangers and delights of growing older. While time takes with it the reliability of memory, it also offers new delights and surprises to be found in nature and the arts. And there are persons, objects and events from the past which all serve as aide-mémoires, binding us to our past and to the experience of “now.”

              Ruth Roach Pierson is a widely published Toronto poet. Author of They’re Still Women After All: The Second World War and Canadian Womanhood (McClelland & Stewart 1986) among other academic studies, Ruth Roach Pierson published her first book of poems, Where No Window Was, with BuschekBooks of Ottawa in the spring of 2002, a year after retiring from thirty-one years of teaching as historian and feminist scholar first at Memorial University of Newfoundland and later at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto.  Her poems have appeared in ARC, Event, The Fiddlehead, The Literary Review of Canada, The Malahat Review, MIX Magazine, Pagitica, Pottersfield Portfolio, Prism International, Queen’s Feminist Review, Quills, and Room of One’s Own as well as a number of anthologies. She lives in Toronto with her partner and their two cats, Haiku and Orange Roughy.  Aide-Mémoire is her second book of poems.

              BuschekBooks is an Ottawa-based press founded in 1996 focussing primarily on poetry and poetry translations. Among other awards, two of its titles have previously won Governor General’s Awards: E. D. Blodgett, Apostrophes: woman at a piano (Governor General’s Award for Poetry), and E. D.  Blodgett and Jacques Brault,  Transfiguration (Governor General’s Award for Translation).

BuschekBooks acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts
which last year invested $20.1 million in writing and publishing throughout Canada.

Nous remercions de son soutien le Conseil des Arts du Canada,
qui a investi 20,1 millions de dollars l'an dernier dans les lettres et l'édition à travers le Canada

BuschekBooks, P.O. Boc 74053, 5 Beechwood Avenue, Ottawa, Ontario K1M 2H9, www.buschekbooks.com

-30-

Fall 2007

Aide-Mémoire
by Ruth Roach Pierson

Upcoming readings!

“Thinking of a Former Student in Early Autumn
In this moment of grace—
the linden barely limned in yellow,
only a fraction of the maple rust-tipped—
to say hold on, rescue’s
on the way
would be to lie,
as we lied to you then
who lay frail against pillows,
wasted from within by cells run
amok, charting your future: the thesis
you would write, the estranged
husband you would reconcile with,
the young daughter you would raise.
Nodding, we sought to hide
our disbelief and returned your smile
with ones we plagiarized and printed
on masked faces, our eyes
tears in the façade.”

Several themes combine in Aide-Mémoire, themes originating in the dangers and delights of growing older. On the one hand is the growing unreliability of memory, on the other the continuing delight and surprise to be found in nature, the arts and cinema. And there are the persons, objects and events from the past, each an aide-mémoire, binding us firmly to the experience of “now.”

Ruth Roach Pierson’s poetry has appeared in several literary journals including Room of One’s Own, PRISM International, Contemporary Verse 2, The Malahat Review, Pagitica and The Fiddlehead. Pierson lives in Toronto, Ontario. Aide-Mémoire is her second book of poetry.

Shattered Fanatics
by A. Mary Murphy

“he let me take his clothes off
then broke me like a plate
put his body that I love like breath
into my mouth and then into my past
and I wonder why he ever let me touch him
why he ever put his naked self within my reach
if all he meant was to blister my poor fingers
put scars in my nouth so the buds no longer taste
why he peeled off my skin and took it with him
for a spectacular screaming souvenir.”

Shattered Fanatics is not for the faint of heart. A. Mary Murphy explores, in sensual detail, a woman’s emotional engagement with the world, from youthful abandon to mature longing and reflection; from the heightened immediacy of the “shattered fanatic” to the empty bed dressed in “widow’s weeds.” This is not a book that settles; it is a book that churns. A searingly honest and intense read.

A. Mary Murphy teaches English at the University of Winnipeg. Her poems have appeared in journals such as The Antigonish Review, Room of One’s Own, The New Quarterly, and Whetstone as well as in journals in Australia, England, France, the USA, and Wales. Murphy lives in Winnipeg, Manitoba. This is her first book of poetry.

Love and Tribal Baseball
by Susan Andrews Grace

“Tribal love is often about the fall of man, the blame
on woman and the fact of being human:
death commences circling at first breath.
Tribal love pre-empts doctrine, its
sin has no fear of ecclesiastical bullies.
The tribe’s bare resources spent to see children grow
survive careening existence.
Tribal baseball is easy to play and on a sunny afternoon—
rescues a child who wanders dangerously close
to the river.
The healer knows healing, that it does not preclude death
but this afternoon
death does not come. The outfielder daydreams
the infield peopled by adults and kids
wearing comfort easily as muscles
slide and shift
microscopic perfection glows.”

Love and Tribal Baseball is a tour-de-force that employs the mythical properties of baseball in a meditation on “tribe” and “tribal love,” both personal and societal. The positions of the game are iconographic; and the players, literally, are playing the game of their lives. Love, memory, genetics—all are seen through the framework of the game. We are drawn into this vision and take our place in the meditation, just as “the outfielder dreams, her glove empty.” An elegant, intriguing book. Susan Andrews Grace has previously published three books of poetry and her poems have appeared in over thirty literary journals. Grace’s book Ferry Women’s History of the World was selected Saskatchewan Book of the Year in 1998. Grace lives in Nelson, British Columbia.

Charenton by Chus Pato
translated by Erín Moure

No US rights “ —rosy balcony?
—dawn
—turquoised curtain?
—wave
—glass snake?
—stream
—antarctic stars?
—heart
—Bengali woman of the Ganges?
—celestial body
—woven snow?
—tablecloths
—purple lividity?
—[...]
—¿marbled transparencies?
—[...]
—intuitive gold?
—?”

Chus Pato is the leading contemporary poet in Galicia. She writes in the Galician language, a repressed minority language, and she believes in the independence of Galicia. Despite being rooted in the regional concerns of a land far from Canada, her poetry, through Moure’s translation, reaches out to us. Pato has said, “To me, the poem is a freedom machine.

"Charenton reflects Pato’s attraction to the possibilities of language. She has said, “I have a prediliction for those constuctions which investigate the possibility of a language-thinking that refuses to repeat the already-written and lives in contact-lamination with the seams of the unsayable, of what hasn’t yet been written into the corporeality of the poem.”

Erín Moure is one of Canada’s leading poets and translators. She has published 17 books of poetry, and she has won many awards including the Governor General’s Award for Poetry. Moure lives in Montreal, Quebec.

Spring 2007

Tomato Sauce Love by Sylvie Nicolas
(translated by Mara Bertelsen)

“It was an evening of sauce and home. An evening of onions, carrots, tofu and sunflower seeds. An evening of healthy veggie sauce. Of tomatoes and thyme. Of my outbursts in the kitchen, singing just to hear myself sing. It was a light-hearted, dance-step evening. An evening when nothing was rushed. Not even the silence that alternated with the bits of lost refrains. An evening that your face at the window of the old door and your fingers that asked to come in can no longer erase.”

The author tells seven love stories linked by the reinvented scent of spaghetti sauce that weaves through them. Deserted, usurped, desperate, hoped-for love. Like life. The love you can see and touch with your fingertips.Sylvie Nicolas has a Bachelor of Arts and a long-standing commitment to theatre. Storyteller, professor, stage director, radio host, researcher and writer, she has been devoted to writing since 1992. A versatile author, she is interested in a wide range of literary genres such as poetry, novels, theatre and stories for children. Her writing portrays profound sensitivity and tangible emotion.

Mara Bertelsen (LTAC, ATIO) obtained her MA in translation studies from the University of Ottawa. She now lives and works as a freelance translator in sunny Provence, where she is also active in local theatre.

Red Bird by Ian Roy

The Moth

There's a dead moth on my desk,
and it's been here for months.
Small dusty wings, flecked brown and grey;
miniscule antennae, bent and useless;
and the furry sliver of a body:
all together, no bigger than my thumbnail.
And when I sigh, which I do often these days,
the air leaves my mouth, drifts
invisibly across my desk,
and little wings tremble nervously.
But then they settle, I settle, we settle
back into this dark space of waiting
that is nowhere, nothing.

Birds, photography and road trips. Bug eaten rats, the falling leaves of a gingko tree, and a blue heron in flight. Red Bird, Ian Roy's debut collection of poetry, takes on the everyday with a keen eye, breathtaking imagery and a sense of the beauty found in the superficially ugly debris of our lives.

At the heart of the collection is a cycle of poems that is, on the surface, about animals in various states of living and dying. In one poem, a neighbour murders a pigeon on his balcony: “The bird fluttered weakly/ beneath the weight of the wet towel/ my neighbour had thrown over it.” In another, the loss of a pet is reflected upon: “Okay, so now I have felt death with my own hands-/ the limp bloodlessness of it, the weakness of it.” Each poem examines some aspect of the natural world, while at the same time exploring the interior world of the various speakers in the poems.

The middle sections of the collection examine the life and art of two photographers: Francesca Woodman and Nan Goldin. These poems take as their starting point, darkness, and attempt to move forward into light. Visually, the effect would be similar to a photo being developed in reverse: “She was in half light-half shadow;/ sometimes there was only darkness.”

The final section of Red Bird, entitled “Traveling, Traveling”, is concerned with various moments in various places. “Like giant candles on a birthday cake,/ towers tipped with flames rose above the trees./ This was in Northern Alberta, at dusk.” The geographical location of each poem takes on a personality of its own; in other words, the location becomes as much of a character in the poem as the people that inhabit these places.

Red Bird is filled with crushing poems about love and death, birds and cars. You will find in these poems those moments of both complex and simple beauty found in the everyday devastation of the natural world. These poems are about the life all around us: the life that exists around the corner, and the life we are living here and now.

Ian Roy’s first collection of short fiction, People Leaving published by BuschekBooks in 2001, was a finalist for the 2002 Upper Canada Breweries Writers’ Craft Award, a finalist for the 2003 Ottawa Book Award and was long-listed for the Relit Award for Fiction. Ian Roy lives in Ottawa. This is his first collection of poetry.