Little Wildheart

by Micheline Maylor

Overview

By turns quirky, startling, earthy, and hope-filled, Micheline Maylor's poems slip effortlessly through topics ranging from what we give up as we age to regrets for love that has passed, the interplay between the animal world and human thought, and the myths we append to ourselves and others. An expansive, conversational voice underscores the poet's technical mastery as her subjects turn from love to hope to fearlessness. Maylor asks readers to perceive how we inhabit our selves, how words construct us. Little Wildheart is rich with challenge and surprise.

I check the box on the government forms: Caucasian. No box for colonized, for the 1/16th bred. Just the double helix of my DNA,
my ability to sun-brown, and my own green-eyed children of the voyageur, river visions still caught in their irises.
We're born out of a long ago season.
Everyone is sure of place and race. Blood and semen mixed in dirt and cervix, convex and enchanted by muskrat's eerie smile,
dark truth furred and matted, stroked by a river paddle.
Let that long tooth bite now in the land of the race riots,
negro, and redskin, the underground railroad,
and the Indian village.
Let the name Pontiac take new form and hit the road,
the righteous mile where judgement and boundary blurs,
especially on matters of composition blood, bone, and relations.

—from "Detroit Zoo bathroom 1977"
See with all clarity, and from way up,
what the predator knows.
Death already hunts.
—from "We Are Entirely Flammable"



Micheline Maylor's poems slip effortlessly through topics ranging from what we give up as we age to regrets for love that has passed, the interplay between the animal world and human thought, and the myths we append to ourselves and others. An expansive, conversational voice underscores the poet's technical mastery as her subjects turn from love to hope to fearlessness. Maylor asks readers to perceive how we inhabit our selves, how words construct us. By turns quirky, startling, earthy, and hope-filled, these poems reflect the moods of existence. Little Wildheart is rich with challenge and surprise.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781772122336
Publisher:	University of Alberta Press
Publication date:	03/07/2017
Series:	Robert Kroetsch
Pages:	88
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 8.80(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

Poet laureate and Mount Royal University professor Micheline Maylor has written for the Literary Review of Canada and Quill & Quire. A co-founder of FreeFall Literary Society, she lives in Calgary. Find her online at www.michelinemaylor.com.

Table of Contents

1 We are entirely flammable
2 Autobiography
3 Convergence
4 The lovers
5 Dissilience
6 Ten
8 In Saskatchewan, surrealism invades the silence
9 Rewind
11 Rust
12 Conscientious objectors
13 Polarity
14 Before the dark
15 Morning on the old reserve
16 Detroit Zoo bathroom 1977
17 Legend/agenda
18 Prayer of the agnostic
19 Constitution
20 Oh, by the way
21 Unrequited
22 Red sky at morning
23 The narrative
24 Three dogs and an old man
25 Almanac of the Douglas fir
26 Cormorants
27 Le deluge
28 For there are still such mysteries, and such advice
30 Consecrated grounds
31 Rapid eye movement
32 Ooh nom
34 About suffering
35 If you
36 No snow falls
37 Pupil
38 How to be in a garden
40 Fleece
41 Thorn apples
42 Dust
43 Another day of feminist perspective
44 Relativity
45 Reasons for learning cursive
46 I always wanted a tattoo
48 Of appreciation
49 Self portrait at 2:45 am
50 Firewall
51 Inclement
52 Dive
53 Evacuation
54 Mercurial
55 Citizenship of the broken heart
56 Fear of water
57 The chosen
58 Let free
59 Ordinary days
60 Drop of doom
62 There is no place that does not see you
63 Between the trees
64 Talisman pool
65 I've forgotten more than I knew
66 Free
67 Benediction
68 I bet you already knew
71 Acknowledgements

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

The sequence of making love and not giving a damn, the consequence of falling for and breaking off, these are Maylor's interests, and she canvasses them in indelible and fragile images, and in erudite and earthy language. Micheline Maylor is as endearing as William Carlos Williams and as dangerous as Sylvia Plath.—George Elliott Clarke

The way the world loves us bubbles up as our desire for each other at first, but in the end that love is our desire's opposite. This is the puzzle: we are born facing away from what we might have; our entire life is learning how to turn around. That turning is the work of this book. And it is beautiful.—Richard Harrison

Editorial Reviews

# 3 on Edmonton Fiction Bestsellers list, April 23, 2017
"In Little Wildheart, Micheline Maylor writes poems that chart the vagaries of love, its cycles of loss and renewal, followed by a realization about the joy and freedom in reinhabiting the self without outside commitment.... Maylor draws images from an elementary and animal world to reflect the psyche and its spiritual progress. Allusive and elusive, educated and down-to-earth, witty and conversational, these oftentimes rollicking poems are fine-tuned with technical skill and strict formalist measures." (Full review at http://www.prairiefire.ca/little-wildheart-micheline-maylor/?cn=bWVudGlvbg%3D%3D)—Gillian Harding-Russell, Prairie Fire
"... this and other poems are most memorable for how Maylor varies phrases to lure and surprise her reader. If Maylor is playing with the conventions of the lyric sentence, she's playing with the conventions of poetry itself in the book's formal pieces... Little Wildheart is a complicated book of deceptively simple parts."—Jacob McArthur Mooney, Quill & Quire
"... fuses the personal and visceral to the mythological and metaphysical. In turns surprising and affective, Maylor's collection presents a bodily, sensory intervention at the intersection between human and animal, intellectual and ephemeral.... [S]he examines, even blueprints, the terrain of human fear, desire, apathy, confusion, elation, and release through unexpected and generative associations. Poems...showcase Maylor's imaginative capacity and draw in the reader with maddening ferocity—we stand at the edge of the abyss that Maylor invokes alongside the speaker.... Her diction is dense yet comprehensible and is well suited to both the casual reader of poetry and those seeking a linguistic challenge.... [N]uanced and masterful poetic technique." Canadian Literature 234 (Autumn 2017) [Full review at http://canlit.ca/article/humanmythos]—Emily Bednarz

The sequence of making love and not giving a damn, the consequence of falling for and breaking off, these are Maylor's interests, and she canvasses them in indelible and fragile images, and in erudite and earthy language. Micheline Maylor is as endearing as William Carlos Williams and as dangerous as Sylvia Plath.
—George Elliott Clarke
The way the world loves us bubbles up as our desire for each other at first, but in the end that love is our desire's opposite. This is the puzzle: we are born facing away from what we might have; our entire life is learning how to turn around. That turning is the work of this book. And it is beautiful.—Richard Harrison

From the Publisher

In Little Wildheart, Micheline Maylor writes poems that chart the vagaries of love, its cycles of loss and renewal, followed by a realization about the joy and freedom in reinhabiting the self without outside commitment.... Maylor draws images from an elementary and animal world to reflect the psyche and its spiritual progress. Allusive and elusive, educated and down-to-earth, witty and conversational, these oftentimes rollicking poems are fine-tuned with technical skill and strict formalist measures.

Prairie Fire - Gillian Harding-Russell