Eleonore Schönmaier

“Eleonore Schönmaier’s Dust Blown Side of the Journey…takes an ecological approach with its rich selection of nature poetry, but her collection is also intimate and self-reflective…Her poems range in national settings, from the Canadian boreal forest, to the Balinese jungle, to the Greek islands, to the ‘remote mountains of Ecuador’…Capturing moments of human greed and human kindness, of striving for community, and of unapologetic joy, Schönmaier’s work is rejuvenating, and offers both a sense of peace and a time for introspection.” —Monica Sousa (read the full review in Canadian Literature).

 

 

Photo by Eleonore Schönmaier

Conversation (from Treading Fast Rivers) is today’s featured poem as part of the League of Canadian Poets Poetry Pause.  Migrations  (from Wavelengths of Your Song) was featured on November 16.  Both poems have been set to music by Emily Doolittle.

“With Poetry Pause, the League will circulate one poem a day, Monday-Friday, each month, all year. For your daily dose of poetics, you can subscribe to our Poetry Pause newsletter or find the poems on our website where they will be archived.”

Eleonore Schönmaier’s poem “Thanksgiving” is included in the recently released Another Dysfunctional Cancer Poem Anthology edited by Priscila Uppal and Meaghan Strimas and published by Mansfield Press. The anthology is included in Chatelaine Magazine’s best books of 2018 list. The book also includes work by Teva Harrison, Molly Peacock, A.F. Moritz, Pamela Mordecai, Christian Bök, Catherine Graham, Canisia Lubrin, Bardia Sinaee, Ron Charach, Adam Sol, Emily Schultz, Jónína Kirton, and Zoe Whittall, and many others.

“Their work offers us new ways of seeing, understanding, and representing this ordinary and extraordinary experience. Current statistics predict 1 in 2 people will be diagnosed with cancer in their lifetime. We need more art to understand the complexity and dimensions of what this means. This is an anthology for anyone who knows someone. This is an anthology for everyone.”

“Eleonore Schönmaier’s [third] poetry collection, Dust Blown Side of the Journey, is the work of a poet who has mastered her craft…featuring a beautifully elaborate intertwining of images…connections continue from poem to poem…akin to recurring melodies or riffs across distinct movements of a composition…poems both captivating and moving.” –Emma Skagan  (read the full article in The Malahat Review)

 

Photo by Eleonore Schönmaier

On September 5, 6, & 7 the St Andrews New Music Ensemble  performed three concerts  featuring Emily Doolittle’s  Conversation (based on a poem by Eleonore Schönmaier from Treading Fast Rivers).  

“Conversation is a 12-minute work for soprano and chamber ensemble, based on the sounds of grey seals (Halichoerus grypus) in haul-out. Schönmaier’s poem explores what Doolittle describes as a ‘slightly uncanny sympathy between humans and grey seals’.”

 

 

What We Don’t Think of Packing

 

but take along anyway:  the shoes on our feet,

the fifty-four bones in our hands, the memory of

the colour of the sheets on our beds.  We prepare

for flight as if we and the customs officers are the only

 

ones who will ever open our baggage.  Nightshirts close

to the suitcase’s zipper so when we arrive we can quickly

begin to restore what we thought we’d lost.  Certain kinds

of loss we bargain for in transit:  eight hours of sleep,

the memory of where we parked the car—

 

In Canada a man stands at the end

of his driveway talking to a neighbour:  I received

the call—search and rescue.  There was no screaming, no

arms hanging loose.  The helicopter shone light on the water

and we picked up what there was—

 

When I walk the beach with the kids

I know what I’m looking for.

I found a piece of plane and slipped it into my pocket.

Didn’t tell the kids—a scrap

the size of a two dollar coin.

 

Loss jangling, except it’s in a currency

no one else understands even if they were on the boat

when he cupped the child’s sneaker in his palm, insisted

the police promise to return it to the family—We never

 

anticipate losing the memories of what we have already lost—

 

 

From Treading Fast Rivers (McGill-Queen’s University Press)

 

 

Heartwood  has now been published.  The anthology includes my poem “Knot” and is over 300 pages which includes beautiful original photographs of trees.   You can order your own copy online.

“Heartwood is a Canadian anthology of poems that celebrates trees. Published by the League of Canadian Poets, this anthology features poets from every province and territory celebrating the immeasurable value trees have for the environment and for the soul. Poets wrote about a tree they loved as a child, a park they sat in, or a forest they go to for invigoration and inspiration. The planet needs trees to survive. Poets from across Canada have written poems to ensure that the message is heard. Compiled and edited by Lesley Strutt. Foreword by Diana Beresford-Kroger. Original photographs by Chuck Willemsen.”

“Time in music is one way to organise chaos, and musical polyphony uses multilayering as a form of time travel.  This is similar to the layering found in life-retrieved memory.  Time for me isn’t linear but the coexistence of multiple layers and I write poetry because I want this polyphony.”  Paul Hamann quotes Eleonore Schönmaier in his feature about her writing in the newly released issue of The New Quarterly .

Editor Pamela Mulloy in her introductory essay for the issue writes: In “Live-Retrieved Memory: The Poetry of Eleonore Schönmaier” Paul Hamann examines his former student’s work and delves into her theory on a “live-retrieved” memory, a conjoining that might be found with merging the past from our letters and journals together with the live memories we carry with us through the years.

Photograph by Eleonore Schönmaier

The landscape of my childhood is now a UNESCO Mixed World Heritage Site.  The nearly 30,000 square kilometers in the heart of Canada’s boreal forest is designated as having “outstanding universal value to all of humanity.”

“There are few great forests left in the world. And even fewer where indigenous people have been taking care of the land for thousands of years. But such a rare place exists…In Ojibwe we call it Pimachiowin Aki (Pim–MATCH–cho–win Ahh–KEY) or “the land that gives life.” Ojibwe (Anishinaabe) Elders teach us that the land provides fresh water, healthy food and clean air for many people near and far.”

 

Weightless

 

At the water’s edge

is an empty canoe

open to the pouring

 

in of starlight:

it’s inconceivable to bail

the light out

 

once it has been

(however briefly)

carried—

 

From Wavelengths of Your Song (McGill-Queen’s University Press)

 

 

 

 

 

“To defend poetry means to defend a fundamental gift of human nature, that is, our capacity to experience the world’s wonder, to uncover divinity in the cosmos and in another human being, in a lizard, in chestnut leaves, to experience astonishment and to stop still in that astonishment for an extended moment or two. The human race won’t perish if this capacity withers—but it will be weaker, worse off, different from what it was throughout those millennia when every civilization placed poetry, in whatever form, at the heart of all human endeavor.”

—Adam Zagajewski

 

Photograph by Eleonore Schönmaier