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”

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781772123166
Publisher:	The University of Alberta Press
Publication date:	02/09/2017
Series:	Robert Kroetsch Series
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	80
File size:	979 KB

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