Full Description
About Mario Relich poetry: 'There is nothing provincial about the poems in Mario Relich collection. Local at times, yes, with evocations of the poet's various home bases, but as the likes of William Carlos Williams and Patrick Kavanagh would remind us, the local is the universal. ( - ) This poet is of both the Old World and the New, intensely European in his range of cultural references, but also transatlantic, whether evoking family and university life in Montreal or verbally transcribing, as it were, a postcard depicting the Civil War memorial in Hartford, Connecticut, and linking this with that city's poet Wallace Stevens, himself redolent of European imagination and American experience. ( - ) It's chiefly in the poems about birds - one type, of course, is the source of the book's title - that we witness, in Muriel Spark's phrase, 'the transfiguration of the commonplace'. (from Tom Hubbard's Introduction)
Contents
PROLOGUE Frisky Ducks 3 I Saint Francis 6 Cormorant 7 Bukowski's Sparrows 9 Magpie 10 A Fleet of Mallards Jubilee 2012 Hovering Sparrow 14 II Caruso 16 Beloved Infidel 19 Old Pontiac: Rawdon Rapids, Quebec 21 Mr Hood 22 A Soviet Veteran 24 Isaac Bashevis Singer 27 The Pocket-Diary 29 III A Newgate Portrait 32 An Old Woman Cooking Eggs 34 Gauguin 37 Bomberg's Blackbird 38 John Grierson 41 Fashion Shoot 42 Art Critic 43 IV Just a Thought 46 Words and Looks 48 13 12 Translator/Traitor 50 Twilight of a Bibliophile 51 Godfather 52 Koan 54 Heartache 55 V Philosopher on Safari 58 Grandfather Clock 60 Losers 62 Covenant 63 A Good Man 65 Siegfried 67 Talking About Gulls 69 VI The Pianist 72 Great War Poker 74 Franco at Bay 76 Algiers, 1943 77 Sermon on the Mound 78 The Only Spanish General in Havana 80 Air Strike 82 VII Style is the Man 86 Resurrection 87 Kingdoms of the Mind 88 Dragon Fruit 90 Soap 92 Ravel's Waltz 93 Hartford Harmonium 95 EPILOGUE Newton's God 99 Notes on the Poems 101 About the Poet 105 About the Artist 106
