Tuesday, April 28, 2009

A Poem for the Canadian North

Since I've been mentioning some Canadian poets lately, here is one from Zachariah Wells' Unsettled, a collection gathered around his experiences living up in Nunavut. He is an active writer, editor and performer, full of poetry and essays and astonishing energy, always up to something, as you can see from his blog, Career Limiting Moves. I'll just share one poem I liked, but for a full review of the entire book, look at John's take over at The Book Mine Set.


Wasteland
for R.

From this hilltop, dusty vistas of crushed
stone, unrestricted zones of brown
gravel. Under your feet the first
purple syllable of saxifrage
breaks rock, puckered heads of poppies
prepare to bellow small yellow
shouts. Over that hill,
in the valley, the river runs
black with the backs of char,
one muscle, a ford. The bay's
thousand whitecaps aren't waves,
they're beluga. And that noise you hear
is not merely the wind.

Zach Wells

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