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DETAILS AND REGISTRATION:
Join Miranda Pearson for a reading with Geoff Inverarity and Rosemary Georgeson, part of the Galiano Literary Festival.
Oxeye Cafe, 2470 Sturdies Bay Rd, Galiano Island, BC V0N 1P0
Books will be for sale.
Miranda Pearson has taught at the University of British Columbia and Simon Fraser University. Bridestones is her sixth book of poetry. Her previous collections include Rail and The Fire Extinguisher. She lives between England and Canada.
Come, anguish. Help us manage / the plainsong of an open shore, / its language of high tide rich and close, / close and hard to see.
The early elegiac poems in Bridestones emerge from the borderlands between life and death, loss and renewal. Drawing on dreams, opera, and visual art, and employing symbolist and playfully surreal imagery, Miranda Pearson questions the ways we tend and grieve - for each other and our environment.
Beginning with a sudden bereavement, the first section ends with a long poem, “Clearance,” that depicts the experience of emptying and departing a home - the physicality of a house serving as a vehicle for processing grief. Pearson writes on family trauma, illness, love, and desire with a pervading sense of hauntedness, compressed, lyrical accounts of complex and ambivalent terrain. The impact of a pandemic lurks in the background, and themes of fear run through much of this collection, with poems exploring how we face our fears - or deny and avoid them - and, ultimately, how we grow and adapt.
Through meditations on art, myth, archaeology, ceremony, and death, Pearson reveals the veil between life and death when drawn to its thinnest. Like the hovering falcon depicted in “A Song of Roses,” the poems view the world from above: “if earth is body, and sky - God help us, spirit.”