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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.” |
BOOKS |
“Trailer Park Elegy.” Maderia Park, B.C.: Harbour. 2017
“Woods Wolf Girl.” Hamilton, ON.: Wolsak & Wynn. 2011 “Crow.” Windsor, ON.: Black Moss Press.2011 “Cuba journal: language and writing.” Windsor, ON: Black Moss. 2003. “You are home.” Windsor, ON: Black Moss Press. 2001. “Marrying the animals.” London, ON: Brick Books. 1995. “The wire-thin bride.” Winnipeg, MB: Turnstone Press. 1990. |
CHAPBOOKS |
“Second marriage.” London, ON: First Place, Can. Poetry Assoc.
“Gravelly Bay.” Vancouver, B.C.: Alfred Gustav Press “Sea Level.” London ON: Baseline Press |
PLAYS AND FICTION |
Highlights include:
The Fool in the “Tarot Show,” Laurie Montemurro, Director. Lulu Goes West Productions, Denman Island, 2014. “Red,” Fountainhead Theatre, John Gerry, Director, London, On., 2013. “Drive,” Kris Nelson, Director. Solo Collective Theatre Emerging Playwrights, Vancouver, B.C. 2007. “Salmonberry: A West Coast fairy tale,” Dustin Maloney, Director, Fultonvale Junior High School, Sherwood Park, Alberta. 2001. |
ANTHOLOGIES(editorial) |
Walde, C., & Hoogland, C. (2010). “Possessions: The Eldon House poems.” London, ON: Museum London.
Guest Editor, (2006) “Cuba Inside/Out”, Cuba Edition, “Descant” Literary Journal. Toronto, ON. |
ANTHOLOGIES |
(2017, forthcoming) “That Girl in Her Story Tight” “Sexual Assault” (Sue Goyette, ed.), U of Regina Press, Regina, Saskatchewan.
(2017, forthcoming) “Your Body Begins” for “GUSH: menstrual manifestos for our times” (Rosanna Deerchild, Ariel Gordon, Tanis MacDonald, eds), Frontenac Press. (2017) “Herring Run (2)” “Refugium: Poems for the Pacific” (Yvonne Blomer, ed.), Caitlin Press, Honeymoon Bay, B.C. (2017) “21. Shih Ho, Biting Through” for “Sustenance: Writers from B.C. and Beyond on the Subject of Food” (Rachel Rose, ed), Anvil Press. (2017) “Like Sleeping Dogs” for the League of Canadian Poets “Poem in Your Pocket anthology,” in cooperation with the Academy of American Poets, for Poem in Your Pocket day, hashtag #pocketpoem (2016) “Red Dresses Hang from the Trees and Towers: Red and Rapunzel are Missing” in “Performing Women” (Penn Kemp, ed.), chapbook for Playwrights Guild of Canada and The Feminist Caucus Archive Series of the League of Canadian Poets. (2015). “How Lucky that My Dog Satisfies My Need for a Horse” in “Translating Horses,” (J. Heimstra, ed.) London, ON: Baseline Press. |