More to Keep Us Warm - Softcover

Scheier, Jacob

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1550227947 ISBN 13: 9781550227949

Verlag: ECW PR, 2008

Inhaltsangabe

Both chronicle and confrontation, the poems of Jacob Scheier’s debut work out and through notions of loss. As the death of a young man’s mother instigates and informs these investigations, the realities of romantic failures become inextricably connected, and in the process More to Keep Us Warm maps the limitations, and breaking points, of the human heart. Questioning how and why we fall in and out of love becomes the collection’s haunting refrain. At the same time, Scheier’s poems mourn the absence of both religious and cultural identity. Facing the painful and confusing losses of his life, the support of the only “tradition” the writer knows — an atheist, socialist upbringing — proves unsatisfying. In response, More to Keep Us Warm explores the formation of a new, complex sense of self as inherited belief systems fail. With humour, sardonic wit, and conversational charm, this search engages and struggles with Judeo-Christian tradition to become an intimate meditation on the nature of God in a secular world.

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Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

Jacob Scheier is the winner of the 2003 Art Bar Discovery Night and was a finalist for CBC Radio's Second Annual Poetry Face-Off. His poetry has been published in the literary journals "Descant "and "The White Wall Review." He lives in Toronto, Ontario.

Jacob Scheier is the winner of the 2003 Art Bar Discovery Night and was a finalist for CBC Radio's Second Annual Poetry Face-Off. His poetry has been published in the literary journals "Descant "and "The White Wall Review." He lives in Toronto, Ontario.

Jacob Scheier is a Toronto writer. His poems have appeared in several literary journals, including Descant and The White Wall Review. Scheier was the winner of the 2003 Art Bar Discovery Night, a finalist for CBC Radio’s second annual Poetry Face-Off, and formerly edited existere, York University’s journal of art and literature.

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More to Keep us Warm

By Jacob Scheier, Michael Holmes

ECW PRESS

Copyright © 2007 Jacob Scheier
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-55022-794-9

Contents

I quickly approaching the beginning, 
The Voices, 
Genesis, 
Big Band Music, 
How to Wrestle an Angel, 
Genesis of Falling Out, 
That Night, 
Harold and Maude, 
I'm Not Here for Sushi, 
A Joke, 
Last Throes, 
Winter (an apology), 
Apollo, 
Stuff, 
My Religious Upbringing, 
The Language of Our People, 
When the Revolution Comes, 
Footage from Haifa, 
Red Diaspora, 
II here, poetry can't hurt you, 
Kaddish for 1956, 
Breakfast Poem, 
Alexandria, 
North America, 
Dear Office of Homeland Security, 
Blazon for a Stranger, 
Method Suicide, 
Women, 
Fear and Trembling (Regine Olsen's Lament), 
Your Haunted House, 
Twenty Minutes Away in Another Continent, 
Istanbul, 
Love Poem, 
Realism and Anti-Realism, 
Kaddish for Ariel Sharon, 
What Keeps Me Up at Night, 
III can it ever be cancelled?, 
November Elegy, 
Tricking into Suicide, 
Collecting, 
Ghosts, 
God, 
Christmas, 
Di, 
Pachelbel's Canon, 
Ghost Story, 
Untitled, 
In Her Voice, 
Choice, 

CHAPTER 1

quickly approaching the beginning

    THE VOICES

    It's alright for the rich and the healthy to keep still;
    no one wants to know about them anyway.
    But those in need have to step forward,
    have to say: I am blind,
    or, I am about to go blind,
    or, nothing is going well with me,
    or, I have a child who is sick,
    or, right here I'm sort of glued together.

    And probably that isn't enough.

    They have to sing; if they didn't sing, everyone
    would walk past, as if they were fences or trees.

    That's where you hear the good singing.

    People are strange: they prefer
    to hear castratos in choirs.

    But God himself comes and stays awhile
    when the world of torn and cut people starts to humble him.

"The Voices" is a collaborative translation, with Di Brandt, of Rainer Maria Rilke's "Title Poem for The Voices"

GENESIS

"The perceptual disturbances may include ... trailing images (images left suspended in the path of a moving object as seen in stroboscopic photography), perceptions of entire objects, afterimages (a same-colored or complementary-colored 'shadow' of an object remaining after the removal of the object), halos around objects ..."

— Description of Hallucinogen Persisting Perception Disorder, DSM IV

    1. First there was the word
    and I only had sounds.

    First there was the word:
    mother

    taught me the names
    of the fowl of the air
    and every beast in the field,
    and father

    was no word for the absence
    of mother,

    my name,
    lost somewhere inside her,
    before it reached
    her mouth, still (and) open.

    2. In the beginning
    of without
    the word, I named again
    the air and field
    sounds clumped together
    and lit the open mouth
    in the face of the deep.

    3. And it was good
    enough.

    4. But He said unto me:
    it can always be better
    and He had many letters after his name,
    blessing him
    with authority.

    He cured,
    not with touch or speech,
    but something small and round
    to swallow.

    When I doubted,
    when I said I can slither through it,
    He spoke unto me: you do not know
    what I know,
    and held out the thin branch of his arm
    and I followed,
    I obeyed.

    5. And on the seventh day
    the earth collapsed.

    On the seventh day
    I lost part of my sight.

    6. First there was the word
    and it was blurred.

    The shadow of each letter
    ate into the next.

    And darkness was upon the face of the deep.

    7. The names (again) turned to absence.
    I could not call this smeared yellow thing
    a flower.
    I could not name this thing,
    encircled in a ghostly halo
    and spraying light in a hundred directions,
    the moon.

    Without names,
    I was not master of the animals,
    but lost amongst monsters.


    BIG BAND MUSIC

    It is music which could only be written before the second war,
    before the soundtrack of Europe was composed by mice
    running along piano keys.
    It is music meant for how our bodies used to be,
    before the dance steps we learned
    became a talent for avoiding the land mines beneath our feet.
    There is something in the pace of the rhythm,
    how it doesn't slow to take in a landscape,
    how it assumes the world will still be there
    when the music stops.

    The song is replaced by the hourly news,
    the wars which are now commercials between melodies.
    I turn off the radio and lie still
    taking in all the sounds my body makes
    when all else is quiet.
    How fragile and clumsy this machinery seems.

    I am lying here waiting for an assassin
    with the wrong address
    or something heavy
    like love or a piano
    to fall on me.

    I am surprised that just once
    my heart hasn't...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: ECW PR
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2008
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1550227947
• ISBN 13: 9781550227949
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Auflage: 1
• Anzahl der Seiten: 79
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar