John Reibetanz launches New Songs for Orpheus at Victoria College

Victoria College, Building 91 Charles Street West, second floor, Toronto, ON M5S 1K5
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Join John Reibetanz for the launch of his latest collection New Songs for Orpheus.
Toronto Poet Laureate Albert Moritz will introduce John.

RSVP john.reibetanz@utoronto.ca as space is limited.
Copies of New Songs for Orpheus available at special rate (cash only).

“With these remarkable poems, John Reibetanz brings an ecopoetic sensibility sensibility to Ovid’s
Myths of Metamorphosis, celebrating the “true metamorphosis” that occurs everywhere in the
natural world, independent of the malign whims of gods and the selfish designs of humans. Working
playfully, and playfully working, rich with music and wit, these poems extend our understanding
of deep change. As usual with Reibetanz, imaginative reach blends with probing intelligence.
Ovid supplies an ancient springboard for a poetic investigation of transformation that – given our
circumstances – could not be more timely.” —Don Mackay

“Here are songs that bear witness to the matter we are and its ongoingness: “… everything alive is
borne / on a river of matter / changing from one identity / to another …” Fluent, riverine, rife with
mortality and mutability, Reibetanz’s poems tumble, shift, flow, ring changes, while time expands
and contracts and expands again. If Ovid is the spring from which these songs rise, the Tao is the
deeper current they ride.” — Maureen Scott Harris