BC Poetry 2018: "The Girls with Stone Faces" by Arleen Paré (Brick Books)

Fourteen Lines About Beauty

1. A certain charm informs any numerical system.
2. It’s close to beauty, but it is not beauty.
3. A line is only a line, but add a loop, a finale, and you’re almost there.
4. It is not the frog.
5. It is not the bog or the weeds or the wart on the frog.
6. Unless you chose the right angle.
7. Philosophers may struggle; apple blossoms pay no attention.
8. If I kiss you, am I more beautiful.  Are you?
9. If proportion.
10. If contrast, say blue verses orange.
11. There once were clouds of butterflies.  The Italian say farfarelles.
12. Papillion in the French.
13. The end might not be beautiful.  
14. The beginning. Yes, but middle is best. 

Who?

Arleen Paré’s first book, Paper Trail, was nominated for the Dorothy Livesay BC Book Award for Poetry and won the City of Victoria Butler Book Prize in 2008. Leaving Now, a mixed-genre novel released in 2012, was highlighted on All Lit Up. Lake of Two Mountains, her third book, won the 2014 Governor General’s Award for Poetry, was nominated for the Butler Book Prize and won the CBC Bookie Award. Paré’s poetry collection, He Leaves His Face in the Funeral Car, was a 2015 Victoria Butler Book Prize finalist. She lives in Victoria with her partner of thirty-seven years. The Girls with Stone Faces is her fifth book.


What?

Arleen Paré, in her first book-length poem after her Governor General Literary Award–winning Lake of Two Mountains, turns her cool, benevolent eye to the shared lives of Florence Wyle and Frances Loring, two of Canada’s greatest artists, whose sculptures she comes face to face with at the National Gallery of Canada. In the guise of a curator, Paré takes us on a moving, carefully structured tour through the rooms where their work is displayed, the Gallery’s walls falling away to travel in time to Chicago (where they met at art school and fell in love in the 1910s), New York, and Toronto (where they lived and worked for the next six decades). Along the way, Paré looks at fashions in art, the politics of gender, and the love that longtime proximity calls forth in us. The Girls with Stone Faces is one of the finest collections of poetry about the lives of artists — and most importantly their work — to appear in Canada in many years.

Although Wyle and Loring were well known during their lifetimes, they have dropped out of common memory. Paré’s collection is art loving art, women loving women, words loving shape, poetry loving stone, the curve of jaw, the trajectory of days.


When?

Arrived September 2017.


Where?

Purchase from the Brick Books website or at your local bookstore. $20.


How?

Lifting back into common memory.

Brick Books * About This Series * More Books, Please!

The copyrights of all poems included in the series remain with their authors, and are reprinted with the permission of the publishers.