Breathing Fire 2: Canada's New Poets

by Lorna Crozier (Editor), Patrick Lane (Editor)

Overview

Breathing Fire II is Lorna Crozier and Patrick Lane's new selection of Canada's finest young poets.

Nine years ago the first volume of Breathing Fire was published to rave reviews, introducing 31 of Canada's finest new poets to a wide and appreciative audience of readers. The anthology has since gone into several printings and become a basic text in schools and universities across the country. And the poets within, including Michael Redhill, Karen Solie, Tim Bowling, Stephanie Bolster, Michael Crummey, Evelyn Lau, Sue Goyette and Carmine Starnino, have gone on to develop and captivate wide readerships of their own.

Today a new and exciting generation of poets has come of age. Some, including Tammy Armstrong, Adam Dickinson, George Murray, Alison Pick, Shane Rhodes, matt robinson, Laisha Rosnau and Nathalie Stephens, have already put out books, and have even won or been shortlisted for major awards. Others with work just as compelling will be introduced for the first time. Breathing Fire 2 collects the best from all 33 of these writers, proudly presenting the next generation of Canada's poets to the world.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780889711952
Publisher:	Nightwood Editions
Publication date:	10/12/2004
Pages:	200
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Lorna Crozier and her partner Patrick Lane are among Canada's leading poets. Crozier is the author of ten books of poetry, including The Garden Going on Without Us (1983), the Governor General's Award-winning Inventing the Hawk (1992), Everything Arrives at the Light (1995), A Saving Grace (1996) and What the Living Won't Let Go (2000). In 1995 she co-edited Breathing Fire: Canada's New Poets with Patrick Lane.

Patrick Lane, considered by most writers and critics to be one of Canada's finest poets, was born in 1939 in Nelson, BC. He grew up in the in the Kootenay and Okanagan regions of the BC Interior, primarily in Vernon. He came to Vancouver and co-founded a small press, Very Stone House with bill bissett and Seymour Mayne. He then drifted extensively throughout North and South America. He has worked at a variety of jobs from labourer to industrial accountant, but much of his life has been spent as a poet, having produced twenty-four books of poetry to date. He is also the father of five children and grandfather of nine. He has won nearly every literary prize in Canada, from the Governor General's Award to the Canadian Authors Association Award to the Dorothy Livesay Prize. In 2014, he became an Officer of the Order of Canada, an honour that recognizes a lifetime of achievement and merit of a high degree. His poetry and fiction have been widely anthologized and have been translated into many languages. Lane now makes his home in Victoria, BC, with his companion, the poet Lorna Crozier.

Read an Excerpt

Quidi Vidi (Alison Pick)

Walk as far as you can,
then farther, past the chain-link barring the road,
tire tracks deep as the rut of your mind,
the place you always get stuck.
Wanting more, or wanting less, to be rid of the word called wanting. Boulders,
tall grass, shrubs you can't name,
birds you can't name,
the ocean. Being a stranger sneaks you through the latch of language - briefly. Bottles, you know.
Condoms, you know. And the weight of being human where other humans have been.
Back of the sea like one line of thought,
slight variation of foam at the shore where artifice gives itself up. Farther out,
a ledge in the rock as though attention might help. Turning for home, hands in your pockets, night mists in like animal breath, the black-brown shapes of gathering mammals bending to drink at the silent pool of mind submerged in the mind.
If a gap in awareness exists, it's there you might have slipped through.

Falling (Matt Rader)

Clipped my skull on the lip of the bridge as I plunged feet-first into the anxious river.
My teeth jawed together, all castanet or clam-shell, crunched my tongue to pulp.
I couldn't talk, or scream, or lift a finger.
Couldn't remember why I was there or where amongst all the falling my body had gone.
Rivulets of red ribboned my head like an insect-
painter's quick study of the wingless human--
The Faller--a gesture-drawing in blood and air.
Here's how I picture it: limbs all stutter and wheel in the rioting wind, all seizure of sign-language and panic-dance, eyes scrolled back, calculating velocity by distance, the time left to swallow or spit before impact. Never mind the fear or embarrassment, I pissed my pants just for the warmth in my crotch, that one last sloppy kiss.
Falling and falling is lonely business.

Plate No. 9 (Nathalie Stephens)

Together perhaps they are together in and out of the image one stopping at a distance from the other which would account for the absence of one the one woman who appeared later in the image before the artist who might not have noticed her presence but they both the women the two women both women are present from the beginning inside and outside of the frame the one that marks lines around the image the one this image in which two women standing and leaning one woman present the other not until later until the artist shuddered and the shudder marked by the fissured city imprinted on the image indicates the presence of two women together one woman and then another she the woman they the two women leaning and standing within reach of the artist and the need to readjust the line of vision the one that draws one woman to the other she both they the two women perhaps drawn one to the other and maybe outside of the frame they are lovers,

from Haynes Town Store (Shane Rhodes)

my grandmother said

--he comes from the south east coast of china as a boy
(or a man or as far as I can figure out wing wong was a hundred all his life)
and after two months on ship or so it is said in vancouver he buys a pound of chocolate and after two months of rice and salt water it tasted of tears wing speaks no english yet he has selling in his blood like the last dime in his pocket he buys more chocolate and breaks it to ten pieces and sells each piece to the immigrants off the boats for 5� each to people like wing or you or me hungry for land or anything that looked like dirt and tasted like the dust storm wing bought his store with and a bag full of nickels--

Table of Contents

Tammy Armstrong
Sheri Benning
Amy Bespflug
Shane Book
Mark Callanan
Brad Cran
Joe Denham
Adam Dickinson
Triny Finlay
Adam Getty warren heiti
Jason Heroux
Ray Hsu
Chris Hutchinson
Gillian Jerome
Anita Lahey
Amanda Lamarche
Chandra Mayor
Steve McOrmond
Alayna Munce
George Murray
Jada-Gabrielle Pape
Alison Pick
Steven Price
Matt Rader
Shane Rhodes matt robinson
Laisha Rosnau
David Seymour
Sue Sinclair
Nathalie Stephens
Sheryda Warrener
Zoe Whittall

Editorial Reviews

In Breathing Fire 2 the latest collection of young Canadian poets from Lorna Crozier and Patrick Lane, we are given a glimpse of the literary world to come ... There is urgency in their words, a cry to be heard ... If poetry allows us to distill our experiences of the world into small snapshots of meaning and truth, then we will have to turn to these new writers -- inhabitants of this new world -- to translate it for us. We will be in good hands.
--Byrna Hallam, The Martlet

Readers of the first edition of Breathing Fire, published nine years ago, will remember a formidable collection of young voices largely unknown to Canada's poetry scene. In Lorna Crozier and Patrick Lane's second introduction to "Canada's New Poets," the results are even more impressive.
--Shannon Cowan, Globe and Mail

This writing is driven by an underlying, ineffable vitality, a legitimacy -- a sense that the words are locked inexorably in place and the poet knows it ... There's much to like in Breathing Fire.
--Jon Mooallem, Books in Canada

Crozier and Lane write their intro in celebration, excitement, and gratitude for the good poems they found. For that, and for all their time and attention, they deserve praise ... [T]he book can give you hours of intense reading engagement and coax you to search for books you might have taken much longer to discover, or never discovered. A decade or two from now ... Breathing Fire 2 is likely to be ... a historical time-capsule.
--Brian Bartlett, The Malahat Review

From the Publisher