Löytöjärvi / poem / Lighthouse Journal

1986

TEXT

is an award-winning writer, academic and critic. She has written eight books (with two more in progress) and has been awarded a Harvard Visiting Scholar¹s position from 2015-2016. atherton.com Blue twilight unfurls its splendour, a Didionesque gloaming for the lonely. I try to catch its tint in my cup, to taste its calm, but its inkiness spills over me until I am glass. Bathed in owl-light, I float on short blue wavelengths. I cannot be broken.

2005

Ocaso Press, 2023

Two Centuries of Russian Poetry: A Short Selection Translations by Colin John Holcombe: Ocaso Press 2023 Translations A short selection from two centuries of Russian verse, generally of poems well known in the west, but given a new treatment. A total of 41 poets from Prokopovich to Mayakovsky are represented by 118 translations. There are two volumes, each provided as a free pdf document. The present volume consists simply of translations. A second consists of extensive (352 pp) of notes, on Russian verse in general, and on the individual translations. Specimen Translations: Pushkin: I Loved You I loved you, love you still, that adoration perhaps commemorates your lingering sway. I would not trouble with a dedication, or have you saddened now in any way. I loved so silently, so hopelessly, that all turned envy, as such shyness can. God grant that true and tender love may be as fully given by some other man. Alexy Tolstoy: Do You Remember, Mary? Do you remember, Mary, that house of former times, the sleeping pool and airy stands of ancient limes? How silent the alleyways, the garden's neglected air, and in the long gallery the gaze of high-hung portraits there? Mary, do you remember with skies at evening time a softly glowing ember, how distant bell would chime? Behind the garden view how clear the stream would flow, how gold was corn, how blue the cornflower steppes would grow? The wood where we together first on our own would go? Mary, do you remember the days flown long ago? Pasternak: February February. Get ink and weep, then of that sobbing February write. The tire-track-brindled slush will keep the springtime burnished black on bright. Hire a cab for six hryvias, hear wheels and bells assault the ears; go back to where the raining has more noise in it than ink and tears. The rooks strung out like blackened pears will fall in thousands from the trees. They splash in puddles where their cares bring eye’s dry sadness to its knees. The thawing parts beneath are black. The screaming wind is torn to bits. To random things more truth comes back than sobbings which some poem fits

Poem, 2018

The essay follows a discontinuous, perforated path through 150 years of poetry in English written in or about the North American Arctic.

Poetry about the Arctic and in particular the prospects of finding a northwest passage through the archipelago of arctic North America is a line of aft that has developed with many perforations from the type of Thomas James's expedition under Charles I in the early 1630s up to the end of the twentieth century and the onset of environmental apocalypse. This paper brings under discussion for the first time the poetry written by explorers and by Canadian poets in order to study responses to remote landscapes and events in them.

Ygdrail, A Journal of the Poetic Arts, 2008

Susan McMaster Here are some poems I still like from what is, I am surprised to discover, almost three decades of publishing. My early pieces appeared in student newspapers and workshop anthologies in the seventies, but my first “real” publication was “Keillor’s Marmalade”, an ode to my Scottish-born husband, in Writers’ Lifeline in 1981. I still remember the thrill – matched only (in my literary experiences) by having my first book of wordmusic, Pass this way again, accepted by bpNichol for Underwhich Editions in 1983, or my first poetry collection, Dark Galaxies, published by Ouroboros here in Ottawa in 1986. Some twenty poetry publications, wordmusic collections, recordings, anthologies, and literary editing projects followed. The most recent, The Gargoyle’s Left Ear: Writing in Ottawa, is less a formal memoir than a collection of anecdotes about growing up as a poet in this town. The timing of this issue of Ygdrasil is a good fit as it tells the other side of this story through the poems themselves.