A Page from the Wonders of Life on Earth
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About this ebook
An ambivalent zoo-tour, an open-eyed meander through a landscape of made and contained things.
A Page from The Wonders of Life on Earth is a book with a coherent vision of nature -- constructed or framed, both in the present and in the recent past -- through zoos, aviaries, formal gardens, menageries, and books like the Time-Life one named in the title. Informed by the author’s grand tour of these zoos and gardens, these poems provide a strong lens for considering the many paradoxes of inter-species relations; they open up the possibility of honest, unsentimental elegy. The book is also a model of what might be called investigative poetry, taking the poet’s combination of perceptual acuity, craft, music and sensibility into these richly troubled places (prisons of, monuments to, museums for the lost natural world) where "arcades sell postcards of old photographs of the arcades," and where questions of what it means to be human, to be animal, to be other and to be art are tangibly in the air. This is Bolster's best work.
Stephanie Bolster
Stephanie Bolster's first book, White Stone: The Alice Poems, won the Governor General’'s and the Gerald Lampert Awards in 1998. She has published two other collections, Two Bowls of Milk, which won the Archibald Lampman Award, and Pavilion. Raised in Burnaby, B.C., she now teaches at Concordia University and lives in Pointe-Claire, Quebec.
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A Page from the Wonders of Life on Earth - Stephanie Bolster
A PAGE FROM THE WONDERS OF LIFE ON EARTH
A PAGE FROM THE WONDERS OF LIFE ON EARTH
STEPHANIE BOLSTER
Brick Books
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Bolster, Stephanie
A page from the wonders of life on Earth / Stephanie Bolster.
Poems.
ISBN 978-1-926829-70-8
I. Title.
PS8553.O479P35 2011 C811’.54 C2011-904254-1
Copyright © Stephanie Bolster, 2011
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 cover image is a detail from Belted Kingfisher,
by Susan Bozic (www.susanbozic.com).
The author photo was taken by Thomas Bolster.
Brick Books
Box 20081
431 Boler Road
London, Ontario
N6K 4G6
Canada
www.brickbooks.ca
For Madeleine and Éloïse
who weren’t and are
Contents
Life of the Mind (Wanders)
Foundations
Arènes de Lutèce
Versailles
The Invention of Distraction
Comfort
Life of the Mind (Wonders)
Iron
Palm House, Kew
Glass
Crystal Palace
Life of the Mind (Tapestry)
Awake
Lingua Botanica
The Garden of Augustus the Strong
Eden or Ark
An Education
Eye of the Beholder
Life of the Mind (Dear)
Red Light District
Hello, You
Lady Giraffe
Domesticity Revisited
Life of the Mind (Task)
Tapestry, The Cloisters
Stuffed Stuff
What Art
The Cloisters
Stella’s Brooklyn Bridge Means New York
A Visit to the Children’s Zoo
Frick Collection
Life of the Mind (Turn)
The Gardens of Capability Brown
Brussels Zoo
Still Life with Mouse and Candle
Date Lament
Last Days of the Crystal Palace
Biodôme
Life of the Mind (Overcast)
Amsterdam
London, February 1963
Three Zoos
Nancy, France
Beyond Saint Petersburg
Home
Life of the Mind (Constellations)
Topiary
Tanyosho Pines
A Brief History of the Bear Pit in the Ménagerie du Jardin des Plantes
In the Solarium
The Last Animal
Life of the Mind (Sanctuary)
Property
Tended Meadow
Song for the Song of the Aviary
Rainbow
When We Stop Visiting
Housing the Great Auk
A Page from The Wonders of Life on Earth
Life of the Mind (Night)
Notes
Acknowledgements
Biographical Note
At the entrance to the arcade, a mailbox: a last opportunity to make some sign to the world one