Mingling Voices

The fact that Cavlacanti's friend, Dante Alighieri, was a supremely fine poet ought not blind us to Cavalcanti's own, rather different excellence. Both men were attracted to the dolce stil nuovo, the "sweet new style" that emerged in thirteenth-century Florence. While Dante's poetry was devoted to his childhood sweetheart, Beatrice, Cavalcanti's poetry had more the tang of real-world experience: he struggled against unruly passions and sought instead to overcome love – a source of torment and despair. It is chiefly through the translations of Rossetti and Pound that English-speaking readers have encountered Cavalcanti's work. Pound's famous translation, now viewed by some as antiquated, is remarkably different from the translation provided here in the graceful voice of poet David Slavitt. Working under the significant restraints of Cavalcanti's elaborate formal structures, Slavitt renders an English translation faithful to the original poetry in both rhyme and rhythm.

Through poems that move between the two languages, McIlwraith explores the beauty of the intersection between nêhiyawêwin, the Plains Cree language, and English, âkayâsîmowin. Written to honour her father's facility in nêhiyawêwin and her mother's beauty and generosity as an inheritor of Cree, Ojibwe, Scottish, and English, kiyâm articulates a powerful yearning for family, history, peace, and love.

Born to a French-Canadian mother and Algerian father, Ouanessa Younsi is a bold and unique voice in modern Francophone poetry. In this intensely personal recitation on identity and ethnicity, Younsi takes the reader on a surreal odyssey through a liminal world of belonging and unbelonging, absence and presence, mind and body. Her visionary work, first published in French and translated here by Rebecca Thompson, is unsettling, riveting and guaranteed to leave readers contemplating the existential mysteries of "self."

In this new edition of a prairie classic, Andreas Schroeder fictionalizes the true story of Tom Sukanen's wild scheme to build an ocean-going ship in the middle of a wheat field in Saskatchewan. Set during the hardships of the "Dirty Thirties," Dustship Glory presents us with Sukanen's mythic effort to escape both the drought and pestilence of his time, as well as his own personal struggle to be free. Featuring an illuminating foreword by beloved Saskatoon writer Don Kerr, Dustship Glory will provide Canadian and international audiences alike with the opportunity to reacquaint themselves with the dramatic tale of a ship that still stands in the fields south of Moose Jaw in Saskatchewan.

Prompted by renowned poet E.D. Blodgett's deep love for and intimate experience of Prague, Praha is a poetic homage to the legendary city's vital spirit. As they build on one another, the poems in the collection lift the reader over the threshold of purely mythic understanding and into the heart of one of Europe's loveliest and most venerable cities. Each poem is accompanied by a translation into Czech, encouraging even those who do not know the language to immerse themselves in its sound. Superbly complemented by the mysteriously eloquent paintings of Czech artist Robert Kessner, Praha offers the moods of Prague in its many seasons and in all its magic.

Working within a postmodern style, this rhythmic and melodious collection of poems originally written in Slovenian by Cvetka Lipuš and translated here by Tom Priestly, blends the real with the surreal, dull urban lives with dreams. Lipuš, known for the lexical beauty of her work, dwells on topics of time and space which she handles in an almost revolving, irreverent manner. Priestly captures the maze-like characteristic of her verse and carefully reconstructs the sonoric beauty of the work in its original language.

Poetic, witty, and ever so faintly surreal, Sefer delicately explores the legacy of the Holocaust for the postwar generation, a generation for whom a devastating history has grown distant, both temporally and emotionally. The novel's protagonist, Jan Sefer, is a psychotherapist living in Vienna-someone whose professional life puts him in daily contact with the traumas of others but who has found it difficult to address his own family background, especially his memories of his father. During a two-week trip to his father's birthplace, Kraków-a visit he has long postponed-he begins to sort out some of his feelings and to connect with a past the memory of which is swiftly disintegrating. Much like memory itself, Sefer speaks to us obliquely, through the juxtaposition of images and vignettes rather than through the construction of a linear narrative. With its fragmentary structure and its preference for hints rather than explanations, the novel belongs to the realm of the postmodern, while it also incorporates subtle elements of magical realism. One of Poland's best-known poets, Ewa Lipska is today a major figure in European literature. In their translation of Sefer, Lipska's first novel, translators Barbara Bogoczek and Tony Howard deftly capture the poet's unmistakable voice-cool and precise, gently ironic, and deeply humane.

With wit and cunning, Noble's poems insinuate themselves into the mediations of "we use language" / "language uses us," into the objectification of "mind," into the struggles and cracking of systems. Cuing on Hegel's epochal revitalization of the syllogism, they begin with sentences-cum-arguments that issue from an everyman's intentions and insights, playing into and baiting the "sociality of reason." In the cut-up sentences then come the restless, accelerated themes-themes that exist only in their variations, ghosting into one another like the dusk and the dawn in a winging, distended now.

Musing is a book of sonnets. Working within the framework of a classic poetic form, Jonathan Locke Hart embarks on an extended meditation on our rootedness in landscape and in the past. As sonnets, the poems are a mixture of tradition and innovation. Throughout, Hart deftly interweaves European culture with North American settings and experience. The collection opens with a foreword by noted literary scholar Gordon Teskey, who reflects on the themes that have marked the evolution of Hart's poetry. Of Musing, Teskey writes: "These deeply thoughtful poems bring layered historical consciousness into the sonnet. They also touch and stir the heart through all its levels."

Crafting wings out of wax and poems from the underground, Zeus and the Giant Iced Tea is a dreamlike voyage through poetic narrative format, blurring the line between poetry and fiction. Exploring the frenetic lives of Mexican cowboys, robots, sultans, Greek gods, and convenience store clerks, Zeus and the Giant Iced Tea shatters preconceived notions of poetry and instead offers a more accessible strain of literary free flow.

With a sure voice, Groulx, an Anishnaabe writer, artistically weaves together the experiences of Indigenous peoples in settler Canada with those of the people of Palestine, revealing a shared understanding of colonial pasts and presents.

The twelve "lays" of Marie de France, the earliest known French woman poet, are here presented in sprightly English verse by poet and translator David R. Slavitt. Traditional Breton folktales were the raw material for Marie de France's series of lively but profound considerations of love, life, death, fidelity and betrayal, and luck and fate. They offer acute observations about the choices that women make, startling in the late twelfth century and challenging even today. Combining a woman's wisdom with an impressive technical bravura, the lays are a minor treasure of European culture.

Spark of Light is a diverse collection of short stories by women writers from the Indian province of Odisha. Originally written in Odia and dating from the late nineteenth century to the present, these stories offer a multiplicity of voices-some sentimental and melodramatic, others rebellious and bold-and capture the predicament of characters who often live on the margins of society. From a spectrum of viewpoints, writing styles, and motifs, the stories included here provide examples of the great richness of Odishan literary culture. In the often shadowy and grim world depicted in this collection, themes of class, poverty, violence, and family are developed. Together they form a critique of social mores and illuminate the difficult lives of the subaltern in Odisha society. The work of these authors contributes to an ongoing dialogue concerning the challenges, hardships, joys, and successes experienced by women around the world. In these provocative explorations of the short-story form, we discover the voices of these rarely heard women.

In this collection by the well-known Edmonton poet, E. D. Blodgett, is an ode to the wisdom and divinity of silence. The poet muses on the quiet of the outdoors and the mysterious relationship that exists between spaces of silence within a city's limits. Most of the short lyrics that make up this sublime collection were written first in English and French before being translated into Cree, Michif, Chinese, and Ukrainian to reflect Edmonton's multicultural past and present. Together they form a composite view of the people and culture that inhabit the city's natural spaces.

Don Kerr knows prairie culture better than most--he knows it from the inside out. He has made us aware of ourselves through his numerous volumes of poetry, his fiction, his many plays, his histories, and his interest in heritage. In this mature, accomplished collection, we can once again admire his unique prairie voice--minimalist, self-effacing, direct yet subtle and nuanced, immersed in his love of the vernacular language of this place. His line is muscular, his timing impeccable, his broad strokes with so few words exemplary.

The venerable tanka and her upstart cousin kyoka mingle with Kerouac's American pop haiku in five-liner imagist poems and linked sequences. In Windfall Apples, Richard Stevenson mixes east and west with backyard barbecue and rueful reflection.

Dreamwork is a poetic exploration of the then and there, here and now, of landscapes and inscapes over time. It is part of a poetry series on dream and its relation to actuality. The poems explore past, present, and future in different places from Canada through New Jersey, New York and New England to England and Europe, part of the speaker's journey. A typology of home and displacement, of natural beauty and industrial scars unfolds in the movement of the book.

Maurice Yacowar challenges genre and form in Roy & Me, a cross between memoir and fiction, truth and distortion. It is the exploration of Yacowar's relationship with Roy Farran-soldier, politician, author, mentor-and his conflict with Farran's anti-Semitic past. Best known for his service with the British Special Air Service during World War II, Roy Farran served as a politician in the Legislative Assembly of Alberta for Premier Peter Lougheed. During his time in Israel as a soldier, Farran allegedly kidnapped and murdered a sixteen-year-old member of the Lehi group, also known as the Stern Gang. Roy & Me is a memoir that edges toward fiction by venturing into Roy Farran's thoughts, drawing simultaneously on his writings and Yacowar's own imagination.

In this poignant and meditative collection of short stories, Zubair Ahmad captures the lives and experiences of the people of the Punjab, a region divided between India and Pakistan. In an intimate narrative style, Ahmad writes a world that hovers between memory and imagination, home and abroad. The narrator follows the pull of his subconscious, shifting between past and present, recalling different eras of Lahore's neighbourhoods and the communities. These stories evoke the complex realities of post-colonial Pakistani Punjab. The contradictions and betrayals of this region's history reverberate through the stories, evident in the characters, their circumstances, and sometimes their erasure. Skillfully translated from Punjabi by Anne Murphy, this collection is an essential contribution to the wider recognition of the Punjabi language and its literature. Introduction Waliullah Is Lost Bajwa Has Nothing More to Say Now Dead Man's Float Pigeons, Ledges, and Streets He Has Left, and Won't Be Back The Beak of the Green Parrot, Submerged in the River Sweater Unstory The Estranged City The Silence of Saints Half Maghar Moon The Wall of Water The great strength of Grieving for Pigeons is its closeness to Zubair Ahmad's original Punjabi. […] These stories transport the reader through a Lahore haunted by several periods of its recent history. Zubair Ahmad is the author of two poetry collections, three short story collections, a translation, and a collection of essays, all written in Punjabi. Two of his short story collections were finalists for the Dhahan Prize for Punjabi Literature in 2014 and 2020. He lives in Lahore, Pakistan. Anne Murphy is an associate professor in the Department of History at the University of British Columbia. Her research focuses on the vernacular literary and religious traditions of the Punjab. Grieving for Pigeons is her first book-length translation. Ahmad paints Lahore and its life with the finest yet distinct strokes that are very gentle at first sight, but have storms raging within. In this poignant and meditative collection of short stories, Zubair Ahmad evokes the complex realities of post-colonial Pakistani Punjab. Skillfully translated from Punjabi by Anne Murphy, this collection is an essential contribution to the wider recognition of the Punjabi language and its literature.