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: 9781771312318

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. 

Book preview

The Perils of Geography

The Perils

of Geography

Helen Humphreys

Brick Books

CANADIAN CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION DATA

Humphreys, Helen, 1961 -

    The perils of geography

Poems.

ISBN 978-1-771312-31-8

1. Title.

PS8565.U56P47 1995    C811′.54    C95-931960-3

PR9199.3.H85P47 1995

Copyright © Helen Humphreys, 1995.

The support of the Canada Council and the Ontario Arts Council is gratefully acknowledged. The support of the Government of Ontario through the Ministry of Culture, Tourism and Recreation is also gratefully acknowledged.

Cover is after a painting, Spear by Louise Andrew.

Brick Books

Box 20081

431 Boler Road

London, Ontario

N6K 4G6

Canada

www.brickbooks.ca

For Matthew, Kathy, and Mary Louise

I. Winter Aconite

Climbing

Up on the backs of hills, higher

than the geometry of birds. Distance

is a wrinkle in the smooth sky and the

sun behind the peaks leaves a residue of

red around the rim, like the glow

of a stove burner left on. Bluebells bruise

the slopes, grounded clouds of dusky

blush. The small, hidden lake,

scuffed grey, is an ear cupped

for the gossip of the screes.

Stop, and this becomes a view.

Take a picture. Look down.

Say, How beautiful. How high.

All a scenic lie. Up here it's

what surrounds not what's made still.

Not the postcard or the word.

It's the molten seam of sheep, draining

out of a ragged hole in the sky. It's

the time while you're walking

towards them, not thinking about

writing this down. The moving line.

Flick of a dog in