Lift: Ghazals for C.
Co-winner of the bpNichol Chapbook Award
Lift traces the transformative cycle of birth and death within a farm family unable to speak of loss. This series of twelve ghazals circles back on and then into itself, as the family comes to terms with what was taken and what remains: with a child’s sickness, the need for hope. Interspersed are hand-printed block prints capturing the isolated feeling of life on a prairie farm. Intentionally stark, they evoke a sense of loneliness, and serve to focus on the house as a stand-alone microcosm within which the world is falling apart.
Materials: The cover is a hand-printed front-to-back linocut print on Arches Aquarelle paper, protected by Mylar sheath. The book is hand-stitched with bees-waxed archival linen thread, and contains three original hand-printed block prints, with text printed on Canson Special Effects paper.
Review •
"...the poems themselves are stark as the prairie, a clapboard house, chokecherries, fireweed. nature is weaved thru the memories of a child that didn’t live but is part of a family’s history, even though her photographs have been taken out of the album. the poems put the photos back in the album, so to speak.
what I particularly like about these ghazals is their compactness or minimalism; the use ghazal couplets is a restrained form that works effectively to represent the understated tone, grief for a deceased child, Carolyn, to whom these ghazals are dedicated. we are told in the endnote that Carolyn died in 1958, two weeks before her second birthday." Amanda Earl
Published by JackPine Press in 2008
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