My Shoes Are Killing Me

By Robyn Sarah

Winner of the 2015 Governor General's Award for Poetry

Winner of the 2015 Canadian Jewish Literary Award for Poetry

In My Shoes are Killing Me, poet Robyn Sarah reflects on the passing of time, the fleetingness of dreams, and the bittersweet pleasure of thinking on the "hazardous . . . treasurehouse" that is the past. Natural, musical, meditative, warm, and unexpectedly funny, this is a restorative and moving collection from one of Canada's most well-regarded poets.

Robyn Sarah is the author of nine previous collections. Ten of her poems have appeared on The Writer's Almanac, and her work has been anthologized in Garrison Keillor's Good Poems for Hard Times (2005), The Norton Anthology of Poetry (2005), and The Bedford Introduction to Literature (2001).

• Language: English
• Publisher: Biblioasis
• Release date: Mar 16, 2015
• ISBN: 9781771960144

Robyn Sarah

Robyn Sarah is the author of eleven collections of poems, two collections of short stories, a book of essays on poetry, and a memoir, Music, Late and Soon. Her tenth poetry collection, My Shoes Are Killing Me, won the Governor General’s Award in 2015. From 2011 until 2020 she served as poetry editor for Cormorant Books. She has lived for most of her life in Montréal.

Book preview

9781771960144-frontcover.jpg

Robyn Sarah

My Shoes Are Killing Me

poems

Biblioasis

•

Windsor, Ontario

Copyright © Robyn Sarah, 2015

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher or a license from The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For an Access Copyright license visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll free to 1-800-893-5777.

first edition

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Sarah, Robyn, author

My shoes are killing me / Robyn Sarah.

Poems.

Issued in print and electronic formats.

ISBN 978-1-77196-013-7 (pbk.).--ISBN 978-1-77196-014-4 (ebook)

I. Title.

PS8587.A3765M92 2015 C811’.54 C2014-907965-6

C2014-907966-4

The poem ‘it is not in great acts’ is reprinted with permission of Les Éditions du Noroît from Le tamis des jours: poèmes choisis (2007), a bilingual edition of poems by Robyn Sarah with French translations by Marie Frankland.

Biblioasis acknowledges the ongoing financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Council for the Arts, Canadian Heritage, the Canada Book Fund; and the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Arts Council and the Ontario Media Development Corporation.

Edited by Eric Ormsby

Copy-edited by Emily Donaldson

Typeset and designed by Kate Hargreaves

oac%2050th_full_black.tifCanada%20Council%20logo.tifHeritage%20Logo.tif

For Jodi,

who gives me courage

In the Slant Light

On a grassy bank under a willow tree

I fell asleep pillowed in an elbow of summer,

and woke to see snow falling.

It is too late now for many things,

too late for so many things.

The sun barely skirts the treetops

before beginning its downward arc.

Across the still air, sporadic hammer-sounds

ring out, metal on metal—men on scaffolds,

men on ladders in the slant light,

battening down the hatches for winter.

What happened to noon, high noon?

There used to be noon.

Time is evaporating like a tide pool,

leaving its stranded flotsam, a cipher

scribbled across the sand. Debris

of our days—we had better look to it.

What to discard, and what pass on?

What yet to hoard to keep us warm?

Something to dig around in.

Something to chew on.

As the future shrinks, the past

looms larger, the past

is compost, is pemmican.

A Box of Old Family Photos

Here we see our

selves in transit.

Time’s the terrain.

Here are our sundry

faces, lost familiars,

the parade of we-were-onces,

bygones of the mirror

half remembered,

hardly believed in, now.

Precious beyond accounting

is this salvage, yet how

unaccountably it takes us

when it takes us unawares:

where are those years?

The past is hazardous

as well as treasurehouse.

Reading Marianne Moore on a Train

Between Cobourg And Kingston

At first I thought the past

must have alighted on