Julia Williams is a poet and prose writer whose work has appeared in The Literary Review of Canada, This magazine, filling Station and CV2, as well as The Mercury Press anthology, Shift & Switch: New Canadian Poetry. Her first book, The Sink House, was published by Coach House in 2004. She lives in Calgary with her husband and a couple of cats.
Carolus Linnaeus. Seduced not by tooth and claw but by names: slick, sussurant. He went north to view a maelstrom. He walked one thousand miles wearing animal skins. Aped Adam.
In the trees, plague soldier beetles, glistening harlequin shells. A jewel family. Karl names shield bugs, rummages burrows, seeking the ghost moth, cuckoo wasp, the wee velvet ant.
Karl is afflicted by tropical dreams, continental friction, colonized islands dense with displaced life. Pets and stowaways: ants, rats, mongooses, the strangler fig, feral pig, norfolk pine and avocado.
Karl would eat bananas and wear frangipani in his hair. Plumeria is fragrant, but on his fake islands the public squares are swine-scented.
Karl measured the bells of each flower, the blubber of each landed seal. He walked north to view a maelstrom. He wore a white wig, kept his footing in snow. If only he had loved finches, not flowers, swapped an alphabet for sweet, lush Galapagos. A green island - now there's a kingdom.
Karl was no Barnum, had no feegee mermaid. A naturalist does not sew a monkey to a fish. He looks for stitches. No Mendel either, that filthy old monk, gamete swapper, slavering over his peapods. Just Karl, blood thick with venom.
peel beeswax to rob golden honey
stolen nectar ripens on my gums
Wait. His ambition took him north and south, to rich harvests. He was a man of science.
soft apocrita, gorged on husks
of bell flowers, sterile pollen
sweet ancient ignorance
What more poetic than a million corpses?
The Swede Karl von Linne adopts a Latin name. In a word: form is how we separate the beast from its herd. He snatches a dead language, conjures a hierarchy and grants animals class, kingdoms.
Gentle Adam, only human, understood at least this basic flaw.
Ten years ago we worked together at Chapters, and here we are in 2007, both of us with first books published this year. Aside from feeling I'm getting on a bit, I remember a poem of yours where you talk about carrying around The Collected Works of Billy the Kid on your back as though "an extra muscle"; did it help inspire this collection about another historical figure?
Yes, I remember that old poem, too. And, yeah, you're right: Ondaatje's early work made a big impression on me back when I was a wide-eyed, and under-read undergraduate student. I'd never heard of an author re-shuffling or re-inventing history, and had never read a contemporary longpoem before. I'd also never seen an author approach historiography or history as...continue reading
Gleaned from his four previous collections and garnished with more than a dozen new poems, Todd Swift's 'Seaway' is both a 'greatest hits' collection for those who've already read this verbally athletic Canadian-born poet at length and a comprehensive introduction for those on the European side of the Atlantic who have had, so far, only the occasional chance to get a taste of his work at the jostling, competitive buffet known as English language poetry. As such, it is long overdue. Swift, after all, has been a tireless champion of a distinctively cosmopolitan, open-minded, post-modernist strand of contemporary writing for quite some time and his work as an editor and ferociously scrupulous blogger in Budapest, Paris and, latterly, London has all too frequently occluded his reputation as a poet with a singular ability to be simultaneously learned, playful and profound...continue reading