Vallum's Poem of the Week 

​Photo of the Sculptor as a Young Boy

​At eighteen months the boy has the clarity of a tuning fork;
an interior self set to a faint vibration,
caused, no doubt, by the slide of rubber on skin
as he catches the ball he’s been handed
and instructed to hold. His vivid grip--
the way his piano fingers span the circumference--
compels the viewer not to his sweet face
but to the instrument of his body, hands in particular,
made for holding the tension
in the mapping of surfaces:
see his thumb worry that fleck of loose paint. The burn
of his life’s work ahead of him.

TRAILER PARK ELEGY HEADS EAST! UPCOMING READINGS ​

November 15, 6 pm, Bastion Books, Victoria, with Amanda Hale 
November 17, Saturday, 1 pm, Harbourfront Library, Nanaimo, with Pat Smekal, hosted by Tina Bielo
April 25, 2019 Saltspring Library, Saltspring Island, with Amanda Hale

The Comox Valley Record honours its own! Thank-you, Record, for your support of poetry. (May 24, 2018 Record, page 17)

League of Canadian Poets for details.  Congratulations to my fellow poets, Benjamin Hertwig, Canisia Lubrin, Puneet Dutt, Karen Enns and Billy-Rae Belcourt. READ POEMS FROM THESE FINALISTS AT LEAGUE BLOG

SHORTLISTED BOOKS FOR THE LEAGUE OF CANADIAN POETS.
​WHEN DID POETRY BECOME A PART OF YOUR LIFE?   I suspect that like most people, I learned the musical patterns of my mother tongue (Dutch) before birth. Before language carries meaning, it exists as a sensory bath, musical and embracing. Research tells us that babies prefer the songs and rhymes their mothers sang to them in the last stages of pregnancy, in their own languages. I remember as a child the giddy pleasure in rhyming, in jokes, bathroom language and in saying things out loud. And still now, a word...(continued at the League of Canadian Poets website)

HOOGLAND APPEARS IN BC BOOKWORLD WHO'S WHO

HOOGLAND APPEARS IN Association of Book Publishers of B.C​

​BOOK REVIEWS

Poetry Review of Trailer Park Elegy, Pulp Literature, reviewed by Emily Osborne.

Poetry Review of Trailer Park Elegy, the Malahat Review, reviewed by Barbara Colebrook Peace. 

A Brotherly Love Revisited, The Ormsby Review, Reviewed by Mary Lou Soutar-Hynes   

Review: Trailer Park Elegy, League of Canadian Poets, Reviewed by Vanessa
Shield.

Review of Trailer Park Elegy, Quill & Quire, January 25, 2018, reviewed by Micheline Maylor,  

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Touring in Toronto: enjoyed reading from TRAILER PARK ELEGY, also the city, the people, my hosts, and the food. OMG. The Grasshopper on College--the seitan dish is amazing. Thanks to The Art Bar, Knife Fork Book, and The Common Reading. 

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Well, that was very fun. Thanks to all who helped make TRAILER PARK ELEGY'S shortlist position on the CBC Poetry Prize so exciting.  

Section 3 of Tourists, on location

Text version of Tourists Stroll a Victoria Waterway.

FIVE SHORTLISTED POETS

Cornelia Hoogland
Laboni Islam 
Sarah Kabamba
Alessandra Naccarato
Harold Rhenisch

Hear complete Poem

Tourists Stroll a Victoria Waterway makes CBC longlist!
Short list announced Wednesday, November 15th! ​

Tourists Stroll a Victoria Waterway (the first of four sections)
1.
The double-decker. The preserved,
random address book:
Tiffany, Jasmine, Jill, Crystal, Kelly, Warren.
Clouds the colour of tea, afternoon,
the Inner harbour. Journal and English schoolgirl
Nivea cream in her backpack.
She was finding her voice like the social worker said.
She hadn't written a word. Was found   
inscribed on Portage Inlet, Craigflower Bridge,
the last overpass before the cigarette
stubbed into her forehead. Call it Bindi,
her mother said, but black. There were
Greyhound busses rolling past the Empress,
girls gliding through the school halls
on platform heels, saying No you're not.

I’m thrilled Tourists Stroll a Victoria Waterway is one of 33 long-listed poems (selected from more than 2,400 English-language submissions) for the CBC Poetry Prize. Four finalists will be announced on November 15, 2017. “Tourists Stroll a Victoria Waterway” is a long poem, 20 years in the making. These poems are based on the newspaper clippings my Mother sent to me about Reena Virk's murder in Victoria's Gorge waterway, as well as my research and other books such as Heather Spear’s “Required Reading.”I still have the now-yellow newspaper articles.

Inspiration behind the Poem

Trailer Park Elegy Launched!

Cornelia Hoogland’s tightly scored long poem explores the thin membrane between the living and the dead.   

In response to her brother’s sudden death, Cornelia Hoogland explores the shift in gravity his dramatic absence creates. Set on the Salish sea on Vancouver Island’s east coast, Trailer Park Elegy reaches back two thousand years to the First Peoples, as well as to the brother whose delight was summers spent at Deep Bay.

Hoogland looks to her child-experiences of death, as well as to literature, chaos theory, dark matter, geological time, and the effect of noise pollution on whales. She turns grief round and round, enlarges it, pushes beyond received ideas of closure and grief’s stages. Death is not only part of life, the dead assign their unfinished work to the living. But the responsibility for connection belongs as much to the dead as to the living.
​
The book’s form, a long poem, provides thematic coherence for the multiple contingencies that disturb the narrator’s present. Like keeping balls up in the air, Hoogland expertly catches and tosses, thus sustaining her imaginative energies throughout the book. Through spare, never-sentimental language, Hoogland’s lyric resources are adequate to human loss and suffering. “I see reflected in my daughters’ faces / the story my brother animates. / He opens his hands, / shapes a funnel his life / pours through.”

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