Advertisement
Bookmark, Charlottetown’s independent bookstore, is pleased to be welcoming Nova Scotia poet Brian Bartlett and New Brunswick poet Michael Pacey to Charlottetown for the double launch of their new collections on Tuesday, January 28th at 7 pm in the Beaconsfield Carriage House. Admission is free and all are welcome.Brian Bartlett’s eighth collection of poems, The Astonishing Room, is one of the strongest in his long career. Those who love his poetry already will be happy to find Bartlett’s acute observations, wit and structural variety on full display. The Astonishing Room can be thought of as a long conversation with mortality and death. Its longest poem, “Our Father in His Nineties,” gathers together moving close-ups of a man gracefully facing the end of life. Whether set by seashores or in forests, a lawyer’s office or an antique shop, Bartlett’s book surprises us with its capacity for facing hard truths, as well as for celebration and gratitude.
Michael Pacey’s Van Gogh's Grasshopper is a collection of fifty poems about insects and other very small creatures. The new book contains odes to insect beauty, the amazing feats they perform and their ultimate mystery. Each poem focuses on particular aspects of a specific tiny life form: their name and what it means, their overall design and structure, the superstitions we have about them, and their particular strategies to survive. The book is bound together through this narrow focus and the result is a most unusual and fascinating collection of poems.
BRIAN BARTLETT has published sixteen collections and chapbooks of poems, along with three volumes of nature writing and a gathering of prose on poetry. He edited selections by Dorothy Roberts, William Bauer, Robert Gibbs, Alden Nowlan and Joe Sherman. His work has received The Atlantic Poetry Prize, the Acorn-Plantos Award for People’s Poetry, and two Malahat Review Long Poem Prizes. After long periods living in New Brunswick and Montreal, Bartlett moved to Halifax/Kjipuktuk in 1990, and taught for three decades at Saint Mary’s University. He has kept a daily journal for many years.
MICHAEL PACEY has been a fixture of Fredericton's literary scene for more than fifty years, publishing his early poems in The Fiddlehead while still in high school, and his first collection with New Brunswick Chapbooks while a sophomore at UNB. In recent years he has produced four collections including The First Step, Electric Affinities, Wild Apples: a Dialogue with Thoreau. The latter two collections were shortlisted for the Fiddlehead Prize
Advertisement
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Beaconsfield Historic House, 2 Kent Street,Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, Canada
