Login
Create Account
Canadian Store (CAD)
You are currently shopping in our Canadian store. For orders outside of Canada, please switch to our international store. International and US orders are billed in US dollars.
 |
Take the Compass |
eBook Available
Rich and nuanced poems that lead the reader to rivers, city outskirts, pandemic-closed cafés, forests, dream landscapes, daily treasures, and losses.
take the harp, take / the Fitbit and the Band-Aid box. Fold the whole / grey sheet of sky, lumpy and unalluring / into your rucksack.
A strong theme of journeys is threaded through Take the Compass. In a sense, every poem is itself a journey - into the past or the present, or toward what we hope and fear for the future. Poems can be journeys of repair and recovery, adventure and discovery. However, even in pandemic times when our journeying is curtailed, or at least confined, when we are abiding in one physical location with chafing and restiveness, we are still travelling. One of those journeys is discovering where language can take us.
Maureen Hynes’s poems travel through cities and their outskirts to rivers, forests, and graveyards. They travel in time into the troubled present, across decades into early childhood, and into our perilous collective futures, seeking guides for these explorations. The title poem addresses the search for tools and instruments that will “ward off adversity” - tools to help us move forward to our chosen destinations. Take the Compass calls on art and nature as invisible helpers, and on uncountable things - personal values and traits such as courage - to “break the bad news into nine living petals.”
As with all her collections, Hynes shows a commitment to social justice, to acknowledging historical and contemporary inequities, to the search for sources of remedy, repair, and renewal, and to the sustaining power of love. The variety of poetic forms she has chosen lets this search carry the complexity and seriousness of its themes.
A strong theme of journeys is threaded through Take the Compass. In a sense, every poem is itself a journey - into the past or the present, or toward what we hope and fear for the future. Poems can be journeys of repair and recovery, adventure and discovery. However, even in pandemic times when our journeying is curtailed, or at least confined, when we are abiding in one physical location with chafing and restiveness, we are still travelling. One of those journeys is discovering where language can take us.
Maureen Hynes’s poems travel through cities and their outskirts to rivers, forests, and graveyards. They travel in time into the troubled present, across decades into early childhood, and into our perilous collective futures, seeking guides for these explorations. The title poem addresses the search for tools and instruments that will “ward off adversity” - tools to help us move forward to our chosen destinations. Take the Compass calls on art and nature as invisible helpers, and on uncountable things - personal values and traits such as courage - to “break the bad news into nine living petals.”
As with all her collections, Hynes shows a commitment to social justice, to acknowledging historical and contemporary inequities, to the search for sources of remedy, repair, and renewal, and to the sustaining power of love. The variety of poetic forms she has chosen lets this search carry the complexity and seriousness of its themes.
Details
Part of the Hugh MacLennan Poetry Series (number 79 in series)
104 Pages, 5 x 7.5
ISBN 9780228018810
September 2023
Formats: Paperback, eBook
“You never know what unpredictable imaginative connections Maureen Hynes will make of earth’s challenges in Take the Compass, but you can be certain to leave her poems surprised by a deeper awareness and a clearer vision than you would ever have thought upon entering them. Other people have books on a bedside table; but Hynes has a “silver pillbox” full of ampersands. Her associations unfold in calibrated order, her seriousness tempered by whimsy.Yet the poems in Take the Compass, with their environmental and social concerns, are not surreal. They’re grounded in a sure maturity of voice that can twist and turn Hynes’s flexible lines into helixes of fresh understanding.” Molly Peacock
“In a world where ‘life’s a rough ascent, / an icy path, sometimes a precipice to hang from,’ the poems in Take the Compass point the reader to poignancy, compassion, and impish imagination. ‘Carry / curiosity and confusion in your hand,’ Maureen Hynes writes, and she does so bravely, in poems ranging from childhood to health and her bedside table. If ‘We have been too knotted / into death counts & pollen counts / & approval ratings’ then Hynes’s skilful poems are ‘silk or twine or rope for rescue or ascent.’” Kevin Irie
“Maureen Hynes welcomes us as an articulate and compassionate friend to a neighbourhood as expansive as human nature itself. Brightness emerges through bleakness: magnolia buds, lapis lazuli, the body a source of renewal, the firm, clear uplift of resistance. These poems are radiant.” Susan Gillis
“In a world where ‘life’s a rough ascent, / an icy path, sometimes a precipice to hang from,’ the poems in Take the Compass point the reader to poignancy, compassion, and impish imagination. ‘Carry / curiosity and confusion in your hand,’ Maureen Hynes writes, and she does so bravely, in poems ranging from childhood to health and her bedside table. If ‘We have been too knotted / into death counts & pollen counts / & approval ratings’ then Hynes’s skilful poems are ‘silk or twine or rope for rescue or ascent.’” Kevin Irie
“Maureen Hynes welcomes us as an articulate and compassionate friend to a neighbourhood as expansive as human nature itself. Brightness emerges through bleakness: magnolia buds, lapis lazuli, the body a source of renewal, the firm, clear uplift of resistance. These poems are radiant.” Susan Gillis
Maureen Hynes, winner of the Gerald Lampert poetry award and shortlisted for the Petra Kenny, Raymond Souster, and Pat Lowther awards, has published six books of poetry. She lives in Toronto.
Before Nightfall
Take the compass, 3
before nightfall 4
Outskirts 5
Can the most recently dead 6
enter the eye 7
Something Pied Piper-ish 8
Kind of Blue 9
What she needs- 10
Bella Ciao 11
All Clear
On Chester Avenue 15
Courthouse Square Park 16
The Dazzle Time 17
Hello, bobbin- 19
Vista Grill 20
After the river, remembering 22
All Clear 23
Such things they plant around my head 24
Forgiveness 25
Stone Pencil
Summer Ice 29
Stone Pencil 30
Elementary 32
No. 5 33
Midwinter Day 35
Sonnet beginning with a line from Carson’s
translation of Sappho 37
Uncountables 38
Medusa’s Hair 39
Treasury 40
To Ward Off Adversity
the invisibles 43
The First Mask 44
The Juggler 45
Porous 46
Hellebores 47
To ward off adversity 48
Classic Blue- 49
Ode to the Emerald Ash Borer 50
dear autumn mandala 51
Quivering toward light 53
For your head 54
Everything’s Hunky-Dory 55
My Bedside Table
Kletic at the Blood Wolf Moon 59
The Constancy of Sleep and Illness 60
Dream Lexicon 61
where we slept that darkest night 62
nightcap 64
mela 65
Fitful 66
my bedside table 67
Ten of Swords 69
Wave-Washed
Not my idea 73
Bus Ticket & Window Seat 74
Winter Night Prayer 75
Floriography 76
how much our bodies 78
Stillness, Floating 80
Museumize 82
solstice, late afternoon 83
Wave-Washed 84
Be planetary, 85
Notes 87
Acknowledgments 91
Take the compass, 3
before nightfall 4
Outskirts 5
Can the most recently dead 6
enter the eye 7
Something Pied Piper-ish 8
Kind of Blue 9
What she needs- 10
Bella Ciao 11
All Clear
On Chester Avenue 15
Courthouse Square Park 16
The Dazzle Time 17
Hello, bobbin- 19
Vista Grill 20
After the river, remembering 22
All Clear 23
Such things they plant around my head 24
Forgiveness 25
Stone Pencil
Summer Ice 29
Stone Pencil 30
Elementary 32
No. 5 33
Midwinter Day 35
Sonnet beginning with a line from Carson’s
translation of Sappho 37
Uncountables 38
Medusa’s Hair 39
Treasury 40
To Ward Off Adversity
the invisibles 43
The First Mask 44
The Juggler 45
Porous 46
Hellebores 47
To ward off adversity 48
Classic Blue- 49
Ode to the Emerald Ash Borer 50
dear autumn mandala 51
Quivering toward light 53
For your head 54
Everything’s Hunky-Dory 55
My Bedside Table
Kletic at the Blood Wolf Moon 59
The Constancy of Sleep and Illness 60
Dream Lexicon 61
where we slept that darkest night 62
nightcap 64
mela 65
Fitful 66
my bedside table 67
Ten of Swords 69
Wave-Washed
Not my idea 73
Bus Ticket & Window Seat 74
Winter Night Prayer 75
Floriography 76
how much our bodies 78
Stillness, Floating 80
Museumize 82
solstice, late afternoon 83
Wave-Washed 84
Be planetary, 85
Notes 87
Acknowledgments 91
