Disturbing the Buddha

By Barry Dempster

Disturbing the Buddha, Barry Dempster's fifteenth collection, is disarmingly conversational and, like the best conversations, it moves between reverence and irreverence, sincerity and irony as it grapples with love, loss, loneliness and simple lack of luck--the "three-leaf clovers" so much more plentiful than the four. Dempster's wit and playful metaphoric turns let us take for granted the courage needed to admit to lif'’s ongoing intensities, disruptions, and indignities. In these poems, a forty-year-old man dons a pink plastic crown on his niece's order; a solitary man watches a Nicole Kidman rom-com with his cat; an aging Aphrodite, more mortal than god, suffers hot flashes. Like the mystic poets he addresses in the book’s final section, Dempster respects the unknown as he comes to terms with the ups and downs of the all-too-human condition.

Shifting effortlessly from light-hearted ode to solemn elegy, Dempster offers no touch-up jobs; instead we find a love of the flaw, a generosity toward it even as he exposes it. This is a poetry of inclusiveness, engaging both our better and worse angels, baring its Achilles' heel and trusting us to do likewise.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Brick Books
• Release date: Mar 15, 2016
• ISBN: 9781771314343

Barry Dempster

Barry Dempster, twice nominated for the Governor General’s Award, is the author of fourteen previous collections of poetry. His collection The Burning Alphabet won the Canadian Authors’ Association Chalmers Award for Poetry in 2005. In 2010, he was a finalist for the Ontario Premier’s Award for Excellence in the Arts and in 2014 he was nominated for the Trillium Award for his novel, The Outside World. He lives in Holland Landing, Ontario.

Book preview

Disturbing the Buddha

Disturbing the Buddha

Barry Dempster

Brick Books

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Dempster, Barry, 1952–, author

Disturbing the Buddha / Barry Dempster.

Poems.

Issued in print and electronic formats.

ISBN 978-1-77131-434-3 (epub)

I. Title.

PS8557.E4827D58 2016              C811’.54              C2015-907888-1

Copyright © Barry Dempster, 2016

We acknowledge the Canada Council for the Arts, the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund, and the Ontario Arts Council for their support of our publishing program.

The author photo was taken by Karen Dempster.

The cover image is a painting by Barbara Cole called Three by Four.

Print design and layout by Marijke Friesen.

Brick Books

431 Boler Road, Box 20081

London, Ontario N6K 4G6

www.brickbooks.ca

ABOUT THIS BOOK

Disturbing the Buddha, Barry Dempster’s fifteenth collection, is disarmingly conversational and, like the best conversations, it moves between reverence and irreverence, sincerity and irony as it grapples with love, loss, loneliness and simple lack of luck—the three-leaf clovers so much more plentiful than the four. Dempster’s wit and playful metaphoric turns let us take for granted the courage needed to admit to life’s ongoing intensities, disruptions, and indignities. In these poems, a forty-year-old man dons a pink plastic crown on his niece’s order; a solitary man watches a Nicole Kidman rom-com with his cat; an aging Aphrodite, more mortal than god, suffers hot flashes. Like the mystic poets he addresses in the book’s final section, Dempster respects the unknown as he comes to terms with the ups and downs of the all-too-human condition.

Shifting effortlessly from light-hearted ode to solemn elegy, Dempster offers no touch-up jobs; instead we find a love of the flaw, a generosity toward it even as he exposes it. This is a poetry of inclusiveness, engaging both our better and worse angels, baring its Achilles’ heel and trusting us to do likewise.

CONTENTS

Centre of Attention

A Circle of White Deck Chairs

Toy Box

The Word of God

The Explained World

The Walk Home

As Close as Distance

Be Drunk

Tampering

The ABCs

Mensch

Colour Sample

Our Lives and Nothing Less

As They Pour the Thirteenth Floor

The Turtles Practice Finitism

Ten Thousand Repetitions

A Minor Accomplishment

Toy Box 2: Princess

Love – after Beatrix Potter

Six Toasts to Neglected Body Parts

Portrait of Aphrodite

The Back Seat

Swallows

Rundle Lounge

Full of Flame

The Widow

Whiteouts

Spider

Love’s Body

Death Notices

Rothko

Mother Ash

Dangling

Death Notices

1/ Sweet Drowning – after Yeats

2/ Sweet Revenge – after Plath

3/ Sweet Transformation – after Whitman

4/ Sweet Oblivion – after Sexton

Positivity

Milton’s Grave

Slaughter

White Pansy, 1927 – Georgia O’Keeffe

Postcard from Lorca, August 1936