Poetry Cabaret with Marie Annharte Baker, Marilyn Dumont and Don McKay
Hosted by Stephen Brockwell
In Person Poetry
Reading McKay is a heightened and altering experience; it changes my personal relationship with language and silence.
Marie Annharte Baker’s fourth book of poems, Indigena Awry, collects a decade’s worth of verse—fifty-nine poems. Set noticeably in Winnipeg and Vancouver, but in many other places on either side of the Medicine Line as well, the poems are a laser-eyed meander through contested streets filled with racism, classism and sexism.
With a title derived from John A. Macdonald’s moniker for the Métis, The Pemmican Eaters explores Marilyn Dumont’s sense of history as the dynamic present. Combining free verse and metered poems, her latest collection aims to recreate a palpable sense of the Riel Resistance period and evoke the geographical, linguistic/cultural, and political situation of Batoche during this time through the eyes of those who experienced the battles, as well as through the eyes of Gabriel and Madeleine Dumont and Louis Riel.
Angular Unconformity: Collected Poems 1970-2014 shows us a life’s work in cross-section, a restless and humane intelligence, ever searching, ever shifting, finding meaning in our blink-of-an-eye existence against a backdrop of geological time unimaginable in its scale. The first comprehensive collection of Don McKay’s poetry displays his gift for thinking through metaphor, as he channels a profound philosophical discourse through plain language and striking imagery. In his poetry, disciplined attention and contemplation break through the commonplace and illuminate an ecological understanding of the world as it is.
