The Ventriloquist gives us four fearless and seminal works
by one of Canada's master poets. A scathing indictment of war and its
ravages, it's also a testament to the power of poetic narrative.
In January 2023 World BEYOND War will be holding a weekly discussion each of four weeks of The Ventriloquist: Poetic Narratives from the Womb of War with
the author Gary Geddes as part of a small group WBW book club limited
to a group of 18 participants. Gary and the publisher, Rock’s Mills
Press, will send each participant a signed book. We'll let you know
which parts of the book will be discussed each week along with the Zoom
details to access the discussions. Learn more and sign up here.
When: For one hour on four Thursdays, January 5, 12,
19, 26, 2023. The time is 1:00 UTC (similar to GMT), 9 am in Beijing,
10 am in Tokyo, noon in Sydney, 2 pm in Auckland, 3 pm in Honolulu, 5 pm
in Los Angeles, 7 pm in Mexico City, 8 p.m. in New York, etc.
Where: Zoom (details to be shared upon registration)
This is a small group series with limited space of up to 18 people.
Sign up to reserve your spot and allow for enough time to receive the book. We look forward to reading and discussing this important book with
you!
You may want to register someone else as a gift -- great idea. Just let us know!
About the Book:
Gary
Geddes is known for his first-person narrative poems and “seamless
impersonations.” Those figures reaching out from the near or distant
past to have their story told include a youth in charge of horses on a
doomed and bloody mission to the New World during the Spanish conquest; a
so-called “mad bomber” who dies in a washroom of the House of Commons
when the dynamite he is carrying explodes; a wily and outrageous Chinese
sculptor and his legion of warrior subjects struggling against imperial
edicts to conform; and POWs in Hong Kong and Japan in World War II
doing their damnedest to survive, a struggle that continued back home in
the face of shocking neglect.
Geddes finds the
phrase that best describes this kind of historical rescue work is “the
ventriloquism of history,” but jokingly admits that he’s never quite
sure if he’s ventriloquist or dummy. The critics have no doubt about
this, however, calling his work “stunning,” “wonderful,” and
“breathtaking in its imaginative reach and verbal dexterity.”
Reviews:
Robert Kroetsch described War & Other Measures
as “the kind of poem poets are only supposed to be able to dream ...
the sustained calibration is beautiful. I didn’t know the long poem
could be so taut.... The years of art and craft are in the book.” Hong Kong Poems prompted Michael Estok to say in a review in The Fiddlehead:
“It is a weighty and worthy and admirable undertaking.... [Geddes’s]
book of elegies puts him on the same level of poetic intensity (perhaps
he even surpasses it) of Milton’s ‘Lycidas’ or Tennyson’s In Memoriam.” As for The Terracotta Army, W.H. New recalled: "I was on the Commonwealth Poetry Prize Jury the year The Terracotta Army
won the Americas Division Prize; it was the jury's unanimous choice,
breathtaking in its imaginative reach, its verbal dexterity.” Of the
same book, Margaret Laurence observed. “[Geddes's] talent is to connect
with some of those ancestral figures and give them to us ... the poem
cycle for the China figures is a NOBLE one ... wonderful stuff ... I was
stunned and awed and this is so good.”
Such words
of praise are reflected in the awards the books received on first
publication: the E.J. Pratt Medal and Prize, Writers Choice Award,
National Magazine Gold Award, and Commonwealth Poetry Prize (Americas
Region). The Terracotta Army, which won the latter award, was also
dramatized and broadcast by CBC and BBC radio.
About the Author:
Gary Geddes has written and edited more than fifty books of poetry,
fiction, drama, non-fiction, criticism, translation and anthologies and
has received more than a dozen national and international literary
awards, including the National Magazine Gold Award. the Commonwealth
Poetry Prize (Americas Region), the Lt.-Governor’s Award for Literary
Excellence and the Gabriela Mistral Prize from the Government of Chile,
awarded simultaneously to Octavio Paz, Vaclav Havel, Ernesto Cardenal,
Rafael Alberti, and Mario Benedetti. He taught English and Creative
Writing for many years at Concordia University and has served as
writer-in-residence at universities and libraries in Edmonton, Ottawa,
Vancouver, Nanaimo and New Westminster, as well as Visiting Writer at
University of Missouri-St. Louis and Distinguished Professor of Canadian
Culture at Western Washington University in Bellingham. He lectures and
performs worldwide. His work has been translated into French,
Spanish, Italian, Dutch, Portuguese and Chinese. He lives on Thetis
Island with his wife, the novelist Ann Eriksson.
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