No Ordinary Place

By Pamela Porter

Pamela Porter's poems celebrate a world awaiting discover. She opens this new collection with a poem entitles An Offering in which she brings to the ceremony poems / for every season of dreams born, / burning, broken and, in particular, one that begins like a perilous grace to develop as naked and tender and wanting. Throughout, one hears and sees images that connect both the poet and reader to other dimensions. Always for Porter, there is the moment tentatively coming into being where the mundane is transformed into something totally unexpected and otherworldly. The image can be one that develops from the natural world as in Branches, Early Spring, where she sees how the trees' red sap set the sky on fire. Another poem based in nature is Naming in which small birds life into the sky / holding in their beaks / the words we don't need to say. Throughout, Porter's poems celebrate moments when we experience the beginning of the world again.

Porter's poems are direct, clear, narrative in intent, yet embedded with dazzling imagery that brings scenes fully alive. Canadian Bookseller

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ronsdale Press
• Release date: Mar 1, 2012
• ISBN: 9781553801528

Pamela Porter

PAMELA PORTER was born in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and she lived in New Mexico, Texas, Louisiana, Washington and Montana before emigrating to Canada with her husband, the fourth generation of a farm family in southeastern Saskatchewan, the backdrop for much of Pamela's work. She is the author of three collections of poetry, and her poems have appeared in numerous journals across Canada and the US as well as being featured on Garrison Keillor's The Writer's Almanac. She is also the author of a number of children’s books, including Sky and Yellow Moon, Apple Moon (illustrated by Matt James). Pamela's first novel in verse, The Crazy Man, received the TD Children's Literature Award, the Canadian Library Association Book of the Year Award for Children, the Geoffrey Bilson Award for Historical Fiction for Young People and the Governor General's Award, as well as several children's choice awards. It was also named a Jane Addams Foundation Honor Book and won the Texas Institute of Letters, Friends of the Austin Public Library Award for Best Young Adult Book. Pamela lives near Sidney, B.C., with her husband, children and a menagerie of rescued horses, dogs and cats.

Book preview

poems.

Branches, Early Spring

They had begun to whisper among themselves,

hesitant at first, but it was cold you see,

and had been months cold. They had begun

to whisper as the ice loosened and thinned

on the trough, as the moon’s startled face

rose above the blackened hills. I heard them

whisper, but did not know the moment

they began, or the precise dawn

in which they wakened from their stiff

and dreamless sleep. I know only

the horses bowed their heads to thatch,

I pushed the wheelbarrow toward the fence

where thin shoots blushed with colour, and higher,

the trees’ red sap set the sky on fire.

Blessing

To be blessed

said the leaf,

is to lie finished

in dark earth,

my edges starry

with frost.

To be blessed

said the branch,

is to stand naked

in winter sun,

my blood rushing gold

and singing.

To be blessed

said the gate,

is to be rusted open

so that all may pass:

deer, leaves, wind,

mice, God.

Begin Again

After lightning, after thunder broke

the darkness brooding over the sleeping houses,

after rain, in silence morning bloomed.

The grasses lay mudded, rose petals

littered the dirt, and in that quiet, a bird

tried her tentative song. The cat

set a paw outside the barn; the horses,

rumps shining, weary with running, stood steaming

as the sun, that minor god, peered

from behind the clouds

as if to make some proclamation.

Then the horses lowered their muzzles to the plain,

and it was the beginning of the world, again.

Cat

She’d come home at last

mewling all night on the porch,

runt bundle of wild

fright in her bones

from the owl

sweeping the dark,

and the uncouth cries

of her owlet young filling

the trees and the night

with the black bells

of their sound.

She’d come home,

some furred creature

swallowed up in her, but now

she’s had enough of wild,

the open mouth, needle teeth

of that life;

she has brought us

a strangeness riding

in her eyes: a