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    Ör
    Ör
    Ör
    Ebook65 pages23 minutes

    Ör

    By Tonja Gunvaldsen Klaassen

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    About this ebook

    Tonja Gunvaldsen Klaassen’s second poetry collection has the condensed intensity of light from old stars. Like a slow, multifoliate explosion, her metaphors track the luminous traces left by the mind as it flows into and away from the life of the body. She is a poet’s poet: her images are emblematic of the inner and outer worlds that both shadow and illuminate everyday life.

    Lost
    thoughts, soot-lined, silver-lined
    concatenations
    incense of coal, cumulonimbus…
    pennies and ponies on the track
    heads or tails, a chance
    the sleeper
    lugged backwards through France,
    honey-moon, lune de miel
    suite, sigh, tunnel of
    tickets and black gates, fate line rising from the luna mount
    mind the gap a porter calls
    and we cross, linked elbow to elbow
    ghost cars sparking the synaptic tracks…

    – from “Trains”

    Gunvaldsen Klaassen’s universe is as elusive as the quantum physicist’s, where particles flash in and out of existence. Yet the shimmering quality of these poems is hooked to the earth by nouns of astonishment: “Belts, boots, spurs, stars” “sepals, stamens, catkins, matchsticks” There is nothing ordinary about the trajectory of human existence, as these poems prove time and again.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBrick Books
    Release dateMar 15, 2003
    ISBN9781771313162
    Ör
    Author

    Tonja Gunvaldsen Klaassen

    Tonja Gunvaldsen Klaassen was born in Saskatoon in 1968. She spent her childhood first in Calgary, and later on a farm in Saskatchewan. Her first collection Clay Birds won the Saskatchewan Book Award for Poetry in 1996. She now lives in Halifax with her husband James and their two small sons.

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