Afloat

By John Reibetanz

Afloat, John Reibetanz's eighth collection of poetry, focuses on water in many manifestations. The centerpiece, a sequence on the Three Gorges Dam and its cultural and environmental implications, brings ancient Chinese sources (Meng Chiao and the painter Dong Yuan) together with modern ones (Edward Burtynsky's photographs and violent video games) to create an elegy that is moving and meditative.
Although water is everywhere present as a subject, it is song that provides the motivating power, the vehicle of longing that animates the book. "We thirst for song"—the closing words of the Lament for the Gorges sequence—could really serve as the book's epigraph. This is poetry exercising its full range of possible functions (to observe, to enquire, to elegize, to imagine, to think, to commemorate, to yearn and to feel), all in the service of that "thirst for song."

• Language: English
• Publisher: Brick Books
• Release date: Feb 6, 2015
• ISBN: 9781771313919

John Reibetanz

John Reibetanz is the author of eleven previous collections of poetry, and his poems have appeared in such magazines as Poetry (Chicago), The Paris Review, The Walrus, and Canadian Literature. A finalist for the National Magazine Awards, the National Poetry Competition, and the ReLit Award, John has given readings in major cities all across Canada. He lives in Toronto and is a Senior Fellow at Massey College and a Fellow of Victoria College, where he received the first Victoria University Teaching Award. The Essential John Reibetanz, edited by Jeffery Donaldson, was published by The Porcupine’s Quill in 2017.

Book preview

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