reading list

Well, it's settled. I'm heading to Di Brandt's National Ecopoetics Symposium in Brandon the third week of March.

Because I thought it might be wise to get a handle on what exactly are ecopoetics, I've set myself the following reading list, based on a 2005 seminar that Brandt gave while still at Windsor University:

Christian Bok, Eunoia
Dionne Brand, Land to Light On
Louise Halfe, Blue Marrow
Don McKay, Camber
Erin Moure, Furious
Mari-Lou Rowley, Viral Suite

...except neither the U of Wpg library nor McNally Robinson had Viral Suite in stock, so I had to settle for Interference with the Hydrangea.

...and then Eunoia had been taken out, as had all Bok's other books, probably by some honours student in search of an appropriate subject to term paper.

...and then, mid-wander through the Can lit shelves, I was tempted by Mary Lawson's Crow Lake and Lisa Moore's Open, especially after finishing the latter's Alligator a couple of weeks ago.

The book I put at the top of the stack, of course, was Brandt's own Now You Care.

The book received heaps of hoopla when it was released a few years ago but even hearing Brandt read from it in Regina (appropriately, on a field trip from a writing retreat) didn't convince me to read it. Perverse, I know, but my particular brand of stubbornness (which runs that if lots of people like something, it can't be very good...) has made for an unexpected treat three years later.

It turns out that Brandt was also a fellow at Hawthornden Castle (where I had the great good fortune to spend a month in June 2005), and so, twenty-one pages into Now You Care, I was able to trail Brandt through her Castle Walk. And then, again, through The poets visit the Rosewell Arms.

I was thinking of putting a stanza from Castle Walk up here but decided against it; if you want your own Now You Care experience, you'll have to work your way around to it, like I did.

What I will do is share a photo I took at Hawthornden, because the experience I had taking it occaisioned the same shock/thrill of recognition.

I came out into the foggy afternoon, wanting to see how far the mist extended into Hawthornden's acreage, and nearly screamed when I saw the small stripped skeleton laid out on the castle wall. Of course, it only took a few moments for me to move closer, trading the soft edges of fog for the hard edges of bone and sinew.

I can't think of a more parallel experience to that of reading Brandt's poetry, which takes readers to "the brink of ecological / economic / psychic / political apocalypse."

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Hawthornden Castle, Edinburgh, Scotland. June 2005.