blue skies poetry

We hope you have enjoyed the poetry of Alexis Kienlen, Diane Buchanan, Peter Midgley, and Pierrette Requier this week, and we hope that you will join them at today’s “Balanced Brunch” event:

Edmonton “A Balanced Brunch” Event:
Sunday, April 29, 1:30 PM – 3:30 PM
Fort Saskatchewan Public Library, 10011-102 Street, Fort Saskatchewan, AB
FREE

Celebrating the 14th Annual National Poetry Month, four talented Edmonton area poets will share their perspective on this year’s theme of “balance” – culturally, creatively, linguistically, personally, socially, playfully, politically, poetically, or perhaps even musically! Featured Artists: Diane Buchanan, Alexis Kienlen, Peter Midgley, Pierrette Requier. Open Mike at 2:30 PM. MC: Dymphny Dronyk.

This year the Festival travels to Fort Saskatchewan to spread poetic joy!

Coffee, tea and muffins will be served.

Sponsored by the League of Canadian Poets.

Visit the Edmonton Poetry Festival website for more great events.

Filed under: News by editor Date 29 April, 2012
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The complicated simplicity of sipping from a woman’s love…
~ Michelle Labossière Brandt

This same
complicated simplicity
I offered my men
their beaking otherwise
their sipping elsewhere
the acute sting
of betrayal
how     after
the days slipped sideways
throat wanted to clasp closed
and in my sorrow  broke
a flash.
Hummingbirds
beat their wings 820 times per minute
and a small iridescent thought
hovers
I might want love again,
to be suspended in mid-air
feel the rapid beating of that tiny tiny heart.
The weightlessness.

~ Pierrette Requier

Pierrette Requier, a bilingual Alberta writer and spoken word performer, enjoys collaborations across artistic disciplines. She serves as literary representative of RAFA, an Alberta organization supporting French artists. Her book of prose poems details from the edge of the village, (Frontenac House, Calgary, Quartet 2009) was short-listed for the Edmonton Book Prize. Her most recent publication Storm/orage from Edmonton’s The Works Festival, 2010 has appeared with Ian Sheldon’s paintings in Storm Chaser Canadian Prairie Skyscapes (August 2011). As Wind Eye Writing Seminar designer and host, Pierrette has facilitated writing workshops across Alberta for aspiring writers from 6 to 86 years old. Recently she has enjoyed participating in Edmonton’s first French LitFest’s Event “On lit à L’artère”.

Pierrette will be reading at the Edmonton “Balanced Brunch” event on April 29. We hope to see you at the Fort Saskatchewan Public Library.

Read more of Pierrette Requier’s poetry:
- Sketches of a Return, February 2006
- Unravelled
- Mount Edith Cavell Suite
- The Angel of Simon
- Autumn Dawn
- You Never Know/On ne sait jamais

Filed under: Pierrette Requier by editor Date 28 April, 2012
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He walked.
From Maseru to Teyateyaneng,
he walked to his father’s trading store.
Then from Teyateyaneng to Maseru,
back to his mother,
he walked.

From Shamva to Bindura,
he walked. Every Saturday,
he danced ’til dawn.
And on the seventh day, he walked
from Bindura back to Shamva.

And in the Qatara Depression
(“Spiders as big as your hand,” he’d love to tell)
he marched and marched
and marched right through Cairo
as well.

He walked up the hill
at Monte Casino,
then stumbled back down again
carrying corpses that remain with him still.

Up the hill at Gross Barmen,
he walked, children buckling his shoulders.
And then he walked back down again.

And in the last days, his hands
walked into Ma’s hands,
held on tight until
he walked right out of life
and into our hearts.

~ Peter Midgley

Peter Midgley’s poetry has appeared in Canadian and South African journals, and his bilingual volume of poems, perhaps i should / miskien moet ek will come out with Kalamalka Press in 2010. His award-winning children’s books have been translated into 28 languages. He is also the author of two plays, Archetypes and Namlish. Peter is currently working on a translation of the Afrikaans children’s classic, Huppelkind, and a book-length creative non-fiction project, A Truce Stranger than Fiction.

Peter will be reading at the Edmonton “Balanced Brunch” event on April 29. We hope to see you at the Fort Saskatchewan Public Library.

Filed under: Peter Midgley by editor Date 27 April, 2012
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I wonder what lies inside
this scarred shell, imagine;
clotted carrion, fractured fossils,
brittle blood, lubricious white of bone,
amber yolk. Alembic outcomes
of an unknown alchemy.

You echo with eons of transmutations.
Once it was believed that you carry maps
of whole constellations pressed into you.
I run my finger across your pitted surface,
feel each star-sparked indentation.

A face rises from your mottled skin,
bloody, scarred and broken, one eye
swollen shut, crack of mouth,
cross-scarred cheek, one granite tear
beneath an open eye. It’s that eye
that haunts me with it’s hopeless gaze.

We share a molecular sameness, a spirit
that lies deep within your torpid cells.
Eons of wisdom crammed
into one small stone. Your unyielding
endurance a dormant promise, blessings
buried in prophetic stillness.

~ Diane Buchanan

Diane Buchanan is a poet and an essayist from Edmonton.  She has written three collections of poetry. Her second book, Between the Silences was short-listed for the Acorn-Plantos award for peoples’ poetry.  Her most recent book is Unruly Angels was published by Frontenac House and in 2011.

Diane will be reading at the Edmonton “Balanced Brunch” event on April 29. We hope to see you at the Fort Saskatchewan Public Library.

Read more of Diane Buchanan’s poetry:
- October
- Revelation
- The Warp and Woof
- On a Prairie Slough Just Outside the City One Morning Mid-July
- The Secret of Grass
- A Different Kind of Loss - and Finding

Filed under: Diane Buchanan by editor Date 26 April, 2012
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i’m going for the king,
but you won’t let me in.
you line up your soldiers,
the children you will sacrifice,
the ones who glide, sail in like messengers.

i try to advance,
but you block me,
take pieces away.

i advance through empty space again,
wounded and weaker, but still focused
on that lone token,
that one piece.

you are too smart for me.

the horsemen wait in the dark,
quick to pounce on my pawns.

there is no bloodshed
on our white and black battlefield,
just advance, retreat,
the severance, the pieces taken
and the final word i speak from my dry mouth.

“check
mate”.

~ Alexis Kienlen

Alexis Kienlen is the author of two poetry collections She Dreams in Red and 13. She is also a journalist and fiction writer and currently works as a reporter for Alberta Farmer. She holds an Honours degree in International Studies from the University of Saskatchewan and a Graduate Diploma in Journalism from Concordia University. Originally from Saskatoon, Alexis has lived in numerous Canadian cities and currently makes her home in Edmonton.

Alexis will be reading at the Edmonton “Balanced Brunch” event on April 29. We hope to see you at the Fort Saskatchewan Public Library.

Read more of Alexis Kienlen’s poetry:
- the old indian and the coat
- portrait of the poet
- South to North Saskatchewan

Filed under: Alexis Kienlen by editor Date 25 April, 2012
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