The Elements - Softcover

Moure, Erín

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1487003722 ISBN 13: 9781487003722

Publisher: House of Anansi Press, 2019

Synopsis

The Elements is a family book, a thinker’s biography in poetry, and a polylingual homage, constructed on a double axis. Poems about and for Moure’s late father ― accepting his dementia as a real way of thinking “world” and “self” in a struggle against invasive powers ― are braced alongside poems invoking the struggle of Galician peasants against the invasion of the armies of Napoleon. It is a book about tenderness, and about The Good, in the face of destructions. By celebrating our ability to think and to revolt, it defends the human pull toward happiness and sovereignty, toward life, toward living. “The infinitely transmissible,” it says, “demands this polyvalent body.”

About this title

About the Author:

One of Canada’s most eminent and respected poets, ERÍN MOURE is a translator from French, Spanish, Galician, and Portuguese, and the author of seventeen books of poetry. Moure has received the Governor General’s Literary Award, the Pat Lowther Memorial Award, and the A.M. Klein Prize, and she has been a three-time finalist for the Griffin Poetry Prize. Most recently, she has been a finalist for the 2018 Kobzar Literary Award. She lives in Montreal.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

The Accidents (Merlín)

That day I went into the trees
―Give me nothing

My scope was interwoven
birds sang their low

cuckoo thing
easily a wave

Small insects rose up into the wave of
Openly

―Ábreme a luzporta!

Swimming in mere air or sheer air
not quite sure

―Could about be
Yet why put such words in a single monstrance?

Open as those trees
Our mermaid is
its long branches trail out to a leaf or vein

My mermaid is
bark’s integument so salutory to view

Give me nothing
Give me not this monstrance
The elements

For which I went today in morning
my mouth black
in the lightcup of the trees

About this edition

• Publisher: House of Anansi Press
• Publication date: 2019
• ISBN 10: 1487003722
• ISBN 13: 9781487003722
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 120