Eyes Like Pigeons

By Roberta Rees

Co-winner of the 1992 Gerald Lampert Award. Winner of the 1992 Writers Guild of Alberta Award for Poetry

Eyes Like Pigeons, Roberta Rees' long poem, comes back, always, to this: "… Thi' in Vietnamese means poetry." Thi, a Vietnamese refugee, is this book’s associational matrix; playing with the possibilities of her name, Rees writes of Thi, poetry both self-reflexive and self-reflective, and immensely different from that which idealizes women with cliches like the title of this volume. The poetry she finds through Thi is as harsh as it is beautiful; its content as sorrowful as the style is liberating, joyful.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Brick Books
• Release date: Oct 15, 1992
• ISBN: 9781771311113

Roberta Rees

Roberta Rees lives in Calgary where she has taught high school and university English courses and now teaches Creative Writing for Women.

Book preview

Ending with Music

Maurice Mierau

Ending with Music

National Library of Canada Cataloguing in Publication Data

Mierau, Maurice, 1962-

      Ending with music

Poems.

ISBN 1-894078-23-3

I. Title.

PS8576.I2858E52 2002          C811’.54          C2002-902873-6

PR9199.3.M45483E52 2002

© Maurice Mierau, 2002

We gratefully acknowledge the Canada Council for the Arts, the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP), and the Ontario Arts Council for their support of our publishing program.

The cover photo of the Washington Avenue Bridge in Minneapolis is by Daniel Corrigan. The American poet John Berryman ended his life by jumping off this bridge on January 7, 1972.

The author photograph was taken by Jeremy Clemens-Mierau.

Brick Books

Box 20081

431 Boler Road

London, Ontario

N6K 4G6

Canada

www.brickbooks.ca

to my mother, the story teller

There are facts in these poems

and stories. Some of them have

never been written down before.

Some are true.

Table of Contents

Family and Others

My mother at 25

Norman Vincent Peale visits Saskatchewan, 1933

Memento

Grandfather, retired, dreams a tell-tale heart

What Uncle Tiny said about women

Easter morning, Jamaica, 1973

Buffalo Plains Hospital

Hundreds of seagulls

Uncle Tiny speculates on theological limits

Nancy (or I was Frank Sinatra)

What I really want

After that, teenagers

Escape

Musicians in love

Watching Wim Wenders with Mike

Silent referendum

The vision thing

Casablanca at 40 below

Church going

He was calm but elated

Murders

Why this version is unbelievable

Soldiers

Amish wedding hymn

Uncle Joe’s couch

What you can’t write about

Looking for words, repeating them

Breakfast at the concentration camp

The brotherhood

Leonhard Keyser, who would not burn

Srebrenica

Tall George Wagner

Revenge stories

Deformation after Luther

The difference between a martyr and a suicide

Uncle George and Nietzsche

My Uncle the SS officer

Returning to the scene

Ending with music

No talking

Night at the opera

So quietly

Suite for Michael

The pain problem

Ending with music

My son learns to ride a bike

Acknowledgements

Biography

Family and Others

do you understand this? where we came from?

it all adds up

figure it out for yourself

– Patrick Friesen, The Shunning

My mother at 25

She looks straight at the camera, the wind barely lifts her dress

in the 50s the white clapboard church in the background

signifies

no back

sliding

no sermon

with more than three points

no idling

gossip

no books

but the bible

minimum sex, maximum starch.

My aunts’ and uncles’ faces sharpen, fade out

the sound of the four part hymn washes them

faces blistered in music,

tenor and bass dance slippery

with her mother’s husky alto,

her father recites poems about shipwrecked sailors

saved by God’s hand on oceans

none of them have ever seen, they are land-locked in

the middle of a five year drought.

Beneath the cross of