We think Stephen Brockwell’s All of Us Reticent, Here, Together is one fine book and apparently we are not the only ones! It has been nominated for the Archibald Lampman Award and the winner will be announced on October 18th at Ottawa City Hall in conjunction with the Ottawa Book Awards.
You can see Stephen read at a presentation of the finalists for the award the night before on October 17. He’s in some excellent company, with Sandra Ridley and Dean Steadman and there is a Facebook event listing if you happen to be in Ottawa. Stephen is a great reader of his own work so it should be a fine night. Good luck to all the writers!
Here’s a little taste from the book’s opening poem:
LOST THINGS
When you found the lost thing on the side of the road
in the gravel, in the mud there, near the rainbow
of the oil slick,
you missed the things that other people found
before you found that thing
and you missed the things not yet
found that didn’t catch your eye,
conditioned as your eye was to catch
a flash of light
not colour
or a blur of darkness
not light,
and there it was in your hand, a
shining or a black thing (also shining)
you could not describe to save your life,
a jewel from a lost ring or
a fragment of a loop from a mother’s earring or
the mother of pearl from a brooch
cracked and detached from its metal by a rolling tire
or maybe it was a tar-encrusted glass marble
dropped from a paving truck—you seem to recall it was—
it was the first thing you knew you had found
giving find its meaning
and you lost it, and the memory of it, you moron!
