This new volume brings together selections from several of
Bringhurst''s collections of poetry, including The Beauty of
the Weapons and The Calling, along with complete
works including the polyphonic Conversations with a Toad
and The Blue Roofs of Japan, and a series of new poems,
"The Living."
The collection''s geography wanders from Japan to the Middle
East to El Salvador to British Columbia. Bringhurst''s attention to
place cuts below the level of foreign tongues and telling landmarks
to more elemental meetings of stone, sky, water, bark, breath and
blood. This elemental imagery is matched in a poetics that joins
together the economy and elucidating repetition present in
improvisational and classical music but so often missing from
contemporary poetry.
Poems from "The Book of Silences" and The Old in Their
Knowing underline the influence of Eastern and pre-Socratic
philosophers on Bringhurst''s thinking, lending the reflexive,
sometimes near-unutterable concepts in the writings of Parmenides,
Pythagoras, Empedokles, Nagarjuna, Dogen and Uddalaka Aruni, a
certain physicality. Here too are attempts to whittle back to the
experience of a body in a knowable and unknowable world.
Those familiar with Bringhurst''s prose will find many of the
same concerns manifested here. The author''s ideas about mythology,
ecology, philosophy, language, art and music are taken up in verse.
In particular, polyphonic poems and the typographic illustration of
them are represented, with selections from Ursa Major, as
well as The Blue Roofs of Japan, New World Suite No. 3,
and Conversations With A Toad, each in their entirety.
About his continued fascination with polyphonics, Bringhurst
says: "If conditions are right, it is good for poems to be spoken
aloud. I mean that the poems themselves can benefit ? and if that
occurs, people may benefit too. Some of the poems in this book are
composed for two or three voices speaking together, saying the same
thing differently or saying different things at once. I understand
that this may seem a needless complication, but poems have
presented themselves to me in this form now for many years, and I
have not found any way around it. In this book, where different
voices speak at the same time, they are printed in different
colors. The poems in which this happens can be read in silence
alone or read aloud with one or two friends ? if conditions are
right. Which, in the presence of one or two friends, they just
might be."