Yvonne Blomer, City of Victoria Poet Laureate 2015-2018, graced BC Book Day attendees with an original poem in the BC Legislature. Yvonne wrote a “glosa”, a 15th-century Spanish poetry form which challenges the writer to celebrate and reinterpret the work of others. It begins with a quatrain (four-lined stanza) to inspire the poem. This quoted quatrain is then repeated at the end of the four subsequent 10-line stanzas. Yvonne then used the titles and themes from several BC-published books to further inspire the locality of the poem. See if you can spot the book titles hidden within Yvonne’s glosa!
“Glosa to the lure and pull of books” for BC Book Day 2018
by Yvonne Blomer, City of Victoria Poet Laureate 2015-2018
There is no Frigate like a Book
to take us Lands away
Nor any Coursers like a Page
Of prancing Poetry –
Emily Dickinson
To fall is inevitable –
the mind goes, the world tilts,
the body dives, the eye
centres, focuses on sans serif –
a character enters a secret library, or folds
her heart into a place: coastal, indigenous,
she is a nurse or a girl who hides a Jewish man,
a woman who rides a ferry across imagined waters,
she runs down burning WWII London streets –
there is no Frigate like a book
even when it is placed on a side-
table, the reader getting on
with their day, voices pre-occupy,
daily-ness becomes pentimento to the novel’s
world; life traced under the surface, an outline
to the book. The world afloat so a drive to the Leg
is overlaid with the scent of sea
in Saint-Malo, or to Guernsey where books
serve every purpose. What purpose but
to take us lands away
into that wild fierce life
where the book prevails. In dreams too,
while walking forest trails, pulling
weeds in the garden, the book
the book sustains. In war it is Spitfire luck
in childhood what holds me up.
Refugium of play – no toy holds
the power of story, no love-affair
is hoarded over a good book, no sustenance
nor any coursers like a page
nor any killer whale who changed the world,
nor death, nor grief’s slow turning page
can pull imagination’s stage to the forefront
the way a book does. Come, niece, paint!
“Oh after this page, after this part.”
Come son, school. “First this book, mum,
this pile of books.” What are you reading?
asks the man in the airport lounge –
“oh just the sweet galloped metre
of prancing Poetry” –
with lines which are borrowed titles from the following BC Books:
- The World Afloat, M.A.C. Farrant, Talonbooks
- Wild Fierce Life: Dangerous Moments on the Outer Coast by Joanna Streetly, Caitlin Press
- The Spitfire Luck of Skeets Ogilvie by Keith Ogilvie, Heritage House Publishing
- What Holds Me Up by Monique Gray Smith, Orca Books
- Refugium: Poems for the Pacific, Yvonne Blomer, ed., Caitlin Press
- Sustenance: Writers from BC and Beyond on the Subject of Food, Rachel Rose, ed., Anvil Press
- The Killer Whale Who Changed the World, Mark Leiren-Young, Greystone Books