Quarrels

by Eve Joseph

Overview

WINNER, 2019 GRIFFIN POETRY PRIZE The poems in this collection reach for something other than truth, the marvelous. Leaves fall out of coat sleeves, Gandhi swims in Burrard Inlet. The poems are like empty coats from which the inhabitants have recently escaped, leaving behind images as clues to their identity. There are leaps between logics within the poems, and it is in these illogical spaces where everything comes together, like the uplift of the conductor’s hand to begin a piece of music where, as Arvo Part put it, the potential of the whole exists.

Griffin Prize Judges’ Citation: “In Quarrels, Eve Joseph’s delightful collection of prose poems, you enter the marvelous and that is the truth! The poet has surrendered herself to the realm of the illogical, trusting that it has a logic of its own, and the outcome is, indeed, a new music. These poems are intriguing spaces and moments defeating the boundaries of the real, but rest assured, Joseph leads you by the hand with warmth, wit and empathy.

Perhaps these poems are crystallisations of a deeply human, spiritual knowledge, gathered over decades working in a hospice. Joseph’s previous book, the exceptional memoir, In the Slender Margin, renders this experience. Certainly, without gravity, poems wouldn’t be able to sing. As distillations of life, these poems, with beauty and charm, hold their own credibility: an omnipresent, merely-in-glimpses-tangible marvelousness, miraculously fastened to the pages of a single slender volume that will fit into most pockets and assure magnificent company on any given journey.”

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781772141658
Publisher:	Anvil Press
Publication date:	06/29/2020
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	86
File size:	589 KB

About the Author

Eve Joseph’s two previous books of poetry, The Startled Heart (Oolichan, 2004) and The Secret Signature of Things (Brick, 2010) were both nominated for the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize. Her nonfiction book, In the Slender Margin was published by HarperCollins in 2014 and won the Hubert Evans award for nonfiction. The book was named one of the top 100 picks of the year by the Globe and Mail. Her most recent book of poetry, Quarrels, was selected as the winner of the 2019 Griffin Poetry Prize (Canadian Winner).

Table of Contents

Part 1

The train blew through 15

Now that I live 16

The capon exploded 17

We met at a birthday party 18

The rain has stopped 19

I rarely leave 20

You are floating 21

Where have all 22

Stranger to herself 23

My mother was 24

Frogs fell from the sky 25

I wait for snow 26

Light stutters down 27

Another day in paradise 28

She began with the idea 29

The daughter of a 30

Because they said 31

You knock on the door 32

The angel is an argument 33

Every day, from 34

Cockroaches swarmed over 35

In grade three 36

What do sailors 37

My mother took me 38

All sons go 39

The caretaker rescues 40

My grandfather lay motionless 41

The name I was given 42

Darkness arrives without 43

In grade school 44

I try to follow 45

People who suffer 46

The poet keeps a jar 47

All afternoon an elephant 48

I'm three, she said 49

From time to time 50

Every word he wrote 51

A five-year-old asks 52

In our basement 53

All morning wind 54

Prometheus is at it again 55

Since the stroke, I 56

After the flood, creation 57

My neighbour is a magician 58

Part 2

Five members of the monster 61

Child with a toy hand grenade 62

Kid in a hooded jacket 63

A Jewish giant at home 64

The Junior Interstate Ballroom 65

Identical twins, Roselle 66

The backwards man 67

Windblown headline 68

Boy stepping off the curb 69

Jack Dracula at a bar 70

Woman carrying a child 71

Girl with a pointy hood 72

Part 3

Bear with me 75

Riding home 76

At ninety-one 77

He'll just slip away 78

Your lungs, those little sacs 79

In the living room 80

Floating on a makeshift 81

Gathered at your bedside 82

Like Baudelaire's moon 83

The horses, when I 84

Notes and Acknowledgments

About the Author