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    Calm Jazz Sea
    Calm Jazz Sea
    Calm Jazz Sea
    Ebook96 pages1 hour

    Calm Jazz Sea

    By Mike Barnes

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    About this ebook

    Shortlisted for the 1997 Gerald Lampert Award

    The poems in Calm Jazz Sea reveal a world forever becoming and disappearing, watched over and handled gently by the compassionate intelligence of Mike Barnes. In the everyday and the ephemeral meals, drinks, weather, work, moments of solitude or connection he finds ways to engage the secret matter of humanity: what horrifies, astonishes, or comforts us. Like the sea of the title, restless and receptive, the language of the poems moves through many levels of voice: from an easy vernacular to the strain of conversation, or from the precise record of sensual matter to the insubstantial gestures that constitute thought.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBrick Books
    Release dateSep 15, 1996
    ISBN9781771311779
    Calm Jazz Sea
    Author

    Mike Barnes

    MIKE BARNES is an award-winning poet and author whose stories have appeared twice in Best Canadian Stories and three times in The Journey Prize Anthology, and have won the Silver Medal for Fiction at the National Magazine Awards. He lives in Toronto.

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      Book preview

      Calm Jazz Sea - Mike Barnes

      Calm Jazz Sea

      Calm Jazz Sea

      Mike Barnes

      Brick Books

      CANADIAN CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION DATA

      Barnes, Mike, 1955-

                     Calm jazz sea

      Poems.

      ISBN 0-919626-85-8

      I. Title.

      PS8553.A7633C34 1996 c8II'.54 C96-930392-0

      PR9I99.3.B3724.C34 1996

      Copyright © Mike Barnes, 1996.

      The support of the Canada Council and the Ontario Arts

      Council is gratefully acknowledged.

      Cover is after a photograph by Heather R. Barnes.

      Brick Books

      www.brickbooks.ca

      Box 20081

      431 Boler Road

      London, Ontario

      N6K 4G6

      Canada

      Acknowledgements

      Thanks to the following magazines in which some of these poems first appeared: The Fiddlehead, Event, Waves, Grain, Dandelion, Origins, Whetstone, and Abbey.

      And to the Canada Council, and the Ontario Arts Council, for financial support.

      I am grateful to the people at Brick Books: to Don McKay for helpful criticism; to Sue Schenk for her patient work in production.

      And especially to Sheila Deane, for her graverobbing.

      Contents

      One

      Man in Horseshoe Bay

      The Act

      Catch

      Tourist Town

      The Deaf in Love

      Michael, in a Field of Butterflies

      Dave's Creed

      Confusion Is Always Greatest Before It Ends

      Crash Helmet

      A New Friend

      A Short Psycho-Sexual History

      Working in the O.R.

      The Floral Jungle

      Natalie

      Two

      Calm Jazz Sea

      Decade

      The Seine

      Fishcleaning

      To the Spider on My Coffeemaker

      The Miraculous Hatch

      Retort

      Black and White Pictures After a Rainstorm

      Bullheads

      Thirst

      The Glass Angler

      Three

      Coffee Soup

      Summer Composition

      Flame

      Film

      Dusk Intersect

      The Lush

      November Poem

      The Truth

      R

      I Like You

      Charity

      Goldfish

      Fall Day

      Four

      Beaver Skull Found on a Beach

      Accident

      Stirring a Can of Soup on the Stove

      The Paintings of Edward Hopper

      Glass Fish

      Letter to Alma

      Cinnamon Knots

      The Man Who Fell Overboard

      You and the Crowd

      Ancient Animals

      Mother and Child

      The Wave

      Hair in a Library Book

      Beaver Skull

      for

      heather rose

      One

      Man in Horseshoe Bay

      The pike seems to look with

      complex, glossy, overfilled eyes

      at the hook in his cheek:

      it is far too simple for him.

      The Act

      One of them

      is led out,

      snorting and frisking.

      ‘Them things'r

      never broken,’ says a cowboy.

      ‘They jes' get tired.’

      The mind is helped

      into the saddle, little feet

      dangling above the stirrups.

      Along the broad back

      muscles ripple

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