May the year close in gentle ways for you and your loved ones and may we look forward with hope to 2022.
Let us work together to ensure all people on earth have access to vaccines. May we strive globally to protect our planet earth. May we do all this essential work with maximum levels of compassion. Let us care for friends, family, neighbours and the people labeled as strangers. A stranger is after all a friend we have not yet met. May we live not in bubbles but in overlapping circles with ripples that reach all in need.
May we live widely and wildly.
There have been many challenges and hardships this year, but creativity also flourished.
From “Sky”
…A great blue
heron swoops low
over our silent
highway…
…Under our
unscratched sky the
air is brisk, clear….
“Bottling” and “Quinzhee” were published in The Antigonish Review. Issue No. 124.
“Sky,” “Windowpanes,” “Neighbours,” “Shrinking,” and “Kintsukuroi” were published in talking about strawberries all of the time. April 4, 2021. You can read the poems plus the Art of Writing interview online.
From “Shrinking”
…I wait for
your next visit when
you’ll again walk
up my three flights
of stairs whistling
all the way.
Wellenlängen deines Liedes was reviewed on Westdeutscher Rundfunk (West German Radio).
“Wellenlängen deines Liedes” ist ein großartiges Buch einer ebensolchen Autorin, die es kennenzulernen gilt.
Matthias Ehlers
“Skin” was selected by the League of Canadian Poets and the Academy of American Poets for their Poem in Your Pocket Day brochure (including postcard and audio recording).
I was invited by Rachel McCrum to participate in the April 26th poetry month reading together with Greg Santos and Moni Brar.
Field Guide to the Lost Flower of Crete was published on June 1st and I hosted a book launch in an urban forest setting.
From “As the sand lines our pockets”
We walk over two bridges
to reach the island where
a shop window reveals a brass
hourglass and a binnacle with
the compass missing…
Late autumn I gave an online reading in German and English. Plus I had a wonderful conversation with Knut Birkholz about the translation process and our thoughts inspired a student to consider translating as a possible career.
From “Entwined”
Thyme clings, high
and away from the grazing and scents
the air…
“Entwined” and “Inner were published in the American anthology Wild Gods: The Ecstatic in Contemporary Poetry and Prose.
“The ecstatic is not something we can control or construct or will into being; it comes from wilder places and speaks to and from and out of chaos: the irrational, the intuitive…It is the burning bush. It is the passion…Ecstasy, joy, the deep grief and surprise of being alive and losing the ones we love, the electromagnetic tug of the earth…laughter so deep and full it scrapes away at our ribs…My own profoundly limited sense of the ecstatic is that nothing can prepare you for it except profound openness itself.” —Robert Vivian, from the Introduction to Wild Gods (New Rivers Press, Minnesota)
In December I performed Poetry in Concert with Panos Gklistis.
From “Music”
The piano that has been
everything, but most of all
the struggle between glimmer
and geist so that our thoughts
always lie in a hollow of music…
Among the dozens and dozens of books I’ve read this year I highly recommend alfabet/alphabet by Sadiqa de Meijer winner of the 2021 Governor General’s Literary Award for nonfiction, Kevin Irie’s The Tantramar Re-Vision, Tomson Highway’s Permanent Astonishment winner of the 2021 Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction, and Memory Speaks by Julie Sedivy.
I’m also looking forward to reading Jaspreet Singh’s My Mother, My Translator (which hasn’t arrived yet). I’m certain it will become one of my favourite books!
Looking ahead, on Sunday January 23th at 10.30 in Vancouver, 11.30 in Yellowknife, 12.30 in Red Lake, 13.30 in Montreal, 14.30 in Halifax, 15.00 in Corner Brook, 18.30 in London, 19.30 in Amsterdam, and 20:30 in Athens I’ll launch Field Guide to the Lost Flower of Crete (MQUP) online. I’ll also have a conversation with the Greek composer, artistic director and performer Michalis Paraskakis about creativity. You’ll find the link to pre-register for the event here. All are welcome. I’ll post additional information soon.
Thank you to all of you for your support and encouragement.
Happy New Year Eleonore! It is great to read your accomplishments from last year listed here. I don’t know why I didn’t read this sooner, but thank goodness I didn’t wait too much longer. I see you buried the Lead! Right at the bottom is the sign up for your book launch! 🙂 Somehow I missed your last online appearance. I hope it will be recorded and so available later as well.
I love your wishes for the New Year, may all the good things in life come your way too!
Thank you Phyllis.