Welcome
Welcome to the official website for Canadian poet Sandy Shreve.
What's New
Saturday, March 24: “Igniting the Green Fuse: Women on Ecopoetry” – with Kim Goldberg, Catherine Owen, Heidi Greco and Kate Braid at the Cascadia Poetry Festival in Seattle, WA (details here)
April 12 - 14: Readings in Arlington, WA, Point Roberts, WA, and Vancouver, BC to launch the anthology Villanelles (ed. Finch & Mali, Everyman's Library) - details TBA
Fall 2012: Watch for my new chapbook, Level Crossing, coming out with the Alfred Gustav Press.
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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:
- Cedar Cottage Suite (chapbook) available from Leaf Press
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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 your local bookstore
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“A paradox of perspective: how the high peaks you see from fifty miles away vanish behind the lower ones as you near, so getting a view of a mountain is like getting a clear vision of a life – you have to pull away from it before its shape starts to emerge from behind all the concealing layers.” – Steven Heighton, Every Lost Country (Knopf Canada, 2010)
