Welcome
What's New
August 2010:
My chapbook, Cedar Cottage Suite, is now available from Leaf Press.
July 2010:
My 2011 photo poems calendar (11" x 17") is now available at People's Co-op Bookstore - 1391 Commercial Drive. (Here's a preview of the 2011 calendar photos). Click here for more about my calendars and cards.
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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 full-length books are:
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Here's an excellent article by Stephen Moss in The Guardian, on 'the future of poetry & what poetry is for'.
Welcome to the official website for Canadian poet Sandy Shreve.
