The Many Singings

By Antoinette Voûte Roeder

Poised on a meditation cushion in the very heart of nature, Antoinette Voûte Roeder transports us to 'the cusp of the in between.' Geese fly, coyotes emerge from the woods, the heart lifts and falls and lifts again. These musical articulations in five movements constitute soulful breathings from the place where language arises, where silence is not void, but alive, awake. Her modulations of song filter a poet's life as through a heron's eye. --Susan McCaslin, author of Into the Mystic: My Years with Olga (Inanna, 2014) These thoughtful poems are compact but substantial. They reveal themselves in many layers. The fresh and delicate descriptions of herons, trees, clouds, and other natural wonders are both tender and ruthless. The poet is indignant about the devastation that greed and money have inflicted on nature but she is more than a "nature poet." Some pieces are penetrating self-disclosures and, though the words seem pared down, they leap off the page. Roeder is a skilled writer who has not succumbed to the dualism of "spiritual best, body is less." She praises embodiment as the "best of all gifts." The last section of the Singings is imbued with the sense of sacred presence while she places the paradox of mystery and naming at the centre. A reader may well sit by a window, gazing, as these poems are read. Singings is in praise of gazing. "Not even poetry," Roeder admits, "approximates gazing." --Hannah Main-van der Kamp, author of Slow Sunday on the Malaspina Strait

• Language: English
• Publisher: John R. Mabry
• Release date: Mar 15, 2016
• ISBN: 9781940671826

Book preview

The Many Singings

"Do not blot

the many singings

that bleed into the air."

A stand of redwoods,

young ones,

planted forty years ago,

tall and strong and straight.

Already they bear the silence

of size, of ancient

history.

It is these trees I love,

that I adore, that speak

of life on earth, imperiled

as never before.

Do not blot

the many singings

that bleed into the air.

Their songs are ours.

All Nature Speaks

If everything has language

the Garry oak’s arthritic branches

speak of age, the Douglas fir’s

impossible height, of aspiration

The sudden thrust of a heron’s bill

inscribes its hunger on darkened waters

Water’s ripples tell a tale

of the earth from its beginnings

and medallions of packed earth

cry a decor of drought

All nature speaks

if we would listen

but even when we don’t

this precious talk bears witness

to the aliveness of all things.

Landscape for the End of Time

paintings by Stephen Hutchings

Remember

the trees

mythical beings

many-branched

textured with leaves

The dappled shade

on sandy path

the living, breathing earth,

Earth, the beloved,

briefly held.

Remember

the rivers

broad and sinuous

curving into the

mist, mirror-glazed,

flowing off

the planet’s edge,

planet earth

the beloved,

briefly held.

Remember

the seas, the sky

as at first dawn

when waters roiled

and clouds bloomed

bright and pastel shades

Remember

the last spasm

light unbearable

halo of flames

and our earth,

Beloved Earth,

briefly held, beheld, behold!

passes into memory.

Owl

I was awakened by a sound

so foreign, I thought it was

a dream.

Hoot-hoot-hoot

-short-long-short-

followed by a quick

hoot-hoot.

I want to see you

was my silent cry.

I slipped out of bed

to the window, flung back

the drapes, gazed into the dark.

Again I heard it,

it was no dream.

I would like to have sat

and chanted with you,

"hoot-hoot-hoot,

hoot-hoot."

Voices

Do not deny

the geese their raucous call

their lively flashing

in the sun

their lyrical landings

on water.

The day may come

and soon enough

when sound and movement

and wild voices

will have

disappeared.

Rant of the Powerless

In our headlong rush

towards extinction we

pull down everything

in sight.

Trampling on the backs of

the ever-poor who have always

offered up their backs, we cry,

More oil, more oil while

the boreal forest swoons, falls

to its knees and ancient mountains give up

their secrets in the violence called fracking.

Monstrous pipelines snake through

sacred burial grounds of native

peoples as politicos line up like cardboard

cut-outs, toothy smiles congealed on faces,

hands meeting in a hearty shake for photo-ops,

while privately they revile each other,

unifying only in their wish to gut all laws

that might slow down the rape