The Perils of Geography

By Helen Humphreys

In her third book of poetry The Perils of Geography, Helen Humphreys charts a world that opens under the prodding and promise of language. With the wit and eye for evocative detail which gained readers for both Gods and Other Mortals and Nuns Looking Anxious, Listening to Radios, Humphreys probes the immediacy of now, the intensity of this, the residue of then. Don’t be deceived by the spare appearance; her poems are resonant and full, "all angles and confidence." Light falls slant across them. She maps "what surrounds not what's made still" -- "the moving line." The line she traces connects the pull of memory and moment, open roads and winter aconite, transcendental basements and ornamental shrubbery. In "Singing to the Bees," the ten poem sequence which makes up the second of three sections in Perils, she slips inside folk wisdoms, wears them with an easy grace, all flesh and wit and possibility: dancing shoes, gifted pigs, swarming bees, airplane nuns and spectre ships. These poems make superstition delicious.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Brick Books
• Release date: Sep 15, 1995
• ISBN: 9781771312325

Helen Humphreys

HELEN HUMPHREYS is an acclaimed and award-winning author of fiction, non-fiction and poetry. She has won the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, a Lambda Literary Award for Fiction and the Toronto Book Award. She has also been a finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction, the Trillium Book Award and CBC’s Canada Reads. Her most recent work includes the novel Rabbit Foot Bill and the memoir And a Dog Called Fig. The recipient of the Harbourfront Festival Prize for literary excellence, Helen Humphreys lives in Kingston, Ontario.