BC Poetry 2017: "Auguries" by Clea Roberts (Brick Books)

Andante Grazioso

The flooded ditches
have sealed with ice.

The morning light
comes later and later—

whispering and full 
of dark threads.

I’ve decided to speak,
to release certainty,

to take winter’s ravens
as my rowdy clerics.

The street lamps bend 
to the crown of frost I make 
just by breathing.

Who?

Clea Roberts lives on the outskirts of Whitehorse, Yukon Territory. Her debut collection of poems, Here Is Where We Disembark (Freehand Books, 2010), was a finalist for the League of Canadian Poets’ Gerald Lampert Award, was nominated for the ReLit Award, and was translated into German and Japanese. Clea’s poems have been published in journals and anthologies in Canada, Europe, the United States, and Australia. She facilitates a workshop on poetry and grief through Hospice Yukon and is the Artistic Director of the Kicksled Reading Series.


What?

Whether speaking of erotic love, domestic life, spiritual wilderness, or family entanglements, the poems of Auguries are saturated with their northern landscape. Roberts is well versed in the distances and dynamics between tedium and ecstasy, light and dark, isolation and solitude, freeze and thaw, flow and stillness. Her poems are spare and clean, each like a single larch in an immense white plain; their exactness startling and arresting. As the Gerald Lampert Award jury citation for her celebrated first book noted, “Her images... are not only crisp and precise, but manage to speak about the physical conditions of this place and its emotional landscape in one and the same lyrical breath...”

Written during a period in which Roberts both became a parent and lost a parent, the poems in Auguries lend themselves to prayer, surrender, celebration, reconciliation, meditation, and auspice.

“Clea Roberts writes poems of clear, quiet beauty. They contain the silence of perception: alive to the world with open eye and open heart.” — Anne Michaels


When?

Arrives April 2017.


Where?

Book Launches: April 9th in Squamish (workshop and reading!). Whitehorse launch in May, date TBA.

Purchases: From the Brick Books website or at your local bookstore. $20.

How?

Prayer, surrender, celebration, reconciliation, meditation, and auspice.

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.