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| Title: | Ark of Koans
|
| Author: | E Blodgett; Illustrated by Jacques Brault |
| ISBN: | 0888644043 : 9780888644046 |
| Format: | Paperback |
| Size: | 165x165mm |
| Pages: | 68 |
| Weight: | .112 Kg. |
| Published: | University of Alberta Press - February 2003 |
| List Price: | 13.5 Pounds Sterling |
| Availability: | In Print |
| Subjects: | Poetry anthologies: from c1900-: Spirituality |
"An Ark of Koans" is a meditation on the mystery of what happens at the moment it happens. Although it takes animals as its threshold, animals only serve as innocent guides toward fathoming, if not understanding, events as small, inconceivable miracles.
"These tiny quatrains are compressed meditations that expand in the mind to reveal glimpse after glimpse of a cosmic vision in which what happens in the world of animals resonates in the human world and in the realm of the divine. They have a kinship with cultural paradigms that reach back to a time before written language. Like the poems of Emily Dickinson and the songs of William Blake, their surprising energy is not the result of simple aggregation, but resides in and releases from the fact that the whole of Blodgett's poetic universe is present in each of its parts." -- George Amabile. “Governor-General's-Award winner E.D. Blodgett presents an excellent new volume, An Ark of Koans. Montreal illustrator Jacques Brault (a poet himself) accompanies the poems with a series of whimsical watercolours that recede as watermarks on the page (a curling fish, a slumping frog, and two insects are particularly notable). The book comprises a series of quatrains on animals, all admitted to the ark of a riddling mind, where they are preserved, one would like to think, from a flood of human indifference. This is by no means a book of environmental protest, but a poetry of identification, of imaginative engagement with the creaturely domain, the meditative word that incarnates and preserves....Blodgett's moving poems build a second ark of sorts, minute riddlings in a fallen rational world that bring love and wonderment to the cause.” University of Toronto Quarterly, Vo. 74, No. 1, Winter 2004/5
