Welcome
Welcome to the official website for Canadian poet Sandy Shreve.
What's New
January 20, 2010: My reading of three poems from Suddenly, So Much is now posted at AuthorsAloud (a great site where you can listen to all kinds of Canadian authors read their work)
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Poetry fascinates me. The math of it - that meticulous balancing of ideas, through image, metaphor and other devices; and the music of it - meticulous, again, that selection of words and their order until they sing. It's the kind of fascination that makes it not just possible, but essential and delightful (even when agonising) to spend hours, days, weeks and more honing a poem until it's as close to right as I can get it. Then, after all the scribbling and tossing away and starting all over again; after all the tinkering and tweaking - the relief (if I'm lucky) of still being moved by the finished work. (As Horace said, "If you want to move me to tears, you must first feel grief yourself.")
As a reader, these same things fascinate me - but in reverse order. First, the elation when my initial experience of a poem is its unique melding of sound and sense so that, one way or another, it opens my heart, my mind, my eyes. Then, the fun of sussing out the technical devices the poet used so well they slipped modestly into the background, allowing the poem as a whole to work its magic.
My latest books are:
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Suddenly, So Much available from Exile Editions or your local bookstore and
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In Fine Form (co-edited with Kate Braid) available from Raincoast Books or your local bookstore
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"For me, poetry is not about suffering. There's enough of that in the world. ... The harder truth is that sense of the divine that can be heard in the wings of a hummingbird, in the perfect rhythm of each beat, and in the miracle of the breaths each of us takes for granted until it is to late to praise them." - Bruce Meyer, Mesopotamia (An After Note)
