The True Names of Birds

By Sue Goyette

Nominated for the 1999 Governor General's Award for Poetry, the 1999 Pat Lowther Award and the 1999 Gerald Lampert Award and Globe 100 book for 1999

The True Names of Birds is the first book-length collection from a voice that has captured the attention of Canadian poetry readers for the last half-dozen years. Deeply centred in domestic life, Goyette's work is informed by a muscular lyricism. These are poems that push the limits, always true to their roots.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Brick Books
• Release date: Oct 15, 1998
• ISBN: 9781771311410

Sue Goyette

Sue Goyette lives in Halifax, Nova Scotia and has published three books of poems, The True Names of Birds, Undone and outskirts (Brick Books) and a novel, Lures (HarperCollins, 2002). Her fourth collection of poems, Ocean, is forthcoming from Gaspereau Press in 2013. She's been nominated for several awards including the Governor General's Award for Poetry, the Pat Lowther, the Gerald Lampert, the Thomas Head Raddall Atlantic Fiction Award and won the 2008 CBC Literary Prize for Poetry, the 2010 Earle Birney Prize and the 2011 Bliss Carman Award. Her poetry has appeared on the Toronto subway system, in wedding vows and spray-painted on a sidewalk somewhere in Saint John, New Brunswick. Sue currently teaches in the Creative Writing Program at Dalhousie University, is faculty for the Banff Wired Writing Studio and works part-time at the Writers’ Federation of Nova Scotia.

Book preview

The True Names of Birds

Susan Goyette

_____

The True Names

of Birds

Brick Books

CANADIAN CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION DATA

Goyette, Susan, 1964-

The true names of birds

Poems.

ISBN 0-919626-99-8

1. Title.

PS8563.094T78 1998    C811′.54    C98-932153-3

PR9199.3.G69T78 1998

Copyright © Susan Goyette, 1998.

We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our

publishing programme. The support of the Ontario Arts

Council is also gratefully acknowledged.

Front cover and interior images are after paintings by Brian DeBlois.

The author photograph is courtesy of Eleonore Schönmaier.

Brick Books

Box 20081

431 Boler Road

London, Ontario

N6K 4G6

Canada

www.brickbooks.ca

For Scott

Contents

In the Stillness of Forest

The True Names of Birds

I Know Women

On the Road Crossing the Island

Again to Be a Daughter

For the Unrejoiced

This Sadness

In the Naming

Solstice and the Other Long Days

To Keep You Well

November: The Sawing of Women in Half

You Know This

Side Orders

For Robyn

Confessions

Gardens

This Contradiction of Passion

The moon on Friday night

Sisters

Faith

Florence

A Collection of Feathers

More Widow Than Queen Victoria

This Stone of Knowledge

On Loss

Regret and All Her Nightgowns

October

Ryan

Distance

The Mythology of Cures

Sinking

In This January

A Gift for the Winter God

Shopping Sprees

The Peonies

A Collage of Seasons for a Grieving Widow

A Chinese Lantern for Audrey

Of the Crows That Follow Me

Women Drinking Tea or Tequila

Guilt

A Collection of Feathers

In the Stillness of Forest

Time is not a straight line, it's more of a

labyrinth, and if you press close to the wall at

the right place you can hear the hurrying steps

and the voices, you can hear yourself walking

past there on the other side.

         – Tomas Tranströmer, ‘Answers To Letters’

The True Names of Birds

There are more ways to abandon a child

than to leave them at the mouth of the woods.

Sometimes by the time you find them, they've made up names

for all the birds and constellations, and they've broken

their reflections in the lake with sticks.

With my daughter came promises and vows

that unfolded through time like a roadmap and led me

to myself as a child, filled with wonder for my father

who could make sound from a wide blade of grass

and his breath. Here in the stillness of forest,

the sun columning before me temple-ancient,

that wonder is what I regret losing most; that