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Chamber Music

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Anthology of poems by Jan Zwicky, with an introduction by Darren Bifford and Warren Heiti that situates Zwicky’s poetry within her philosophical work. The afterword consists of an interview with th...
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  • 11 December 2014
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Arcing across thirty years and seven volumes, Jan Zwicky’s poetry has always been acutely musical (and sensitive to the silence out of which music comes). In the compositions in Chamber Music, the first anthology of Zwicky’s poems, one may perceive the attunement of her vocations: poet, philosopher, violinist. Her poetry both praises and relinquishes the earth, bearing witness to the fierce skies of the prairies and the freezing rain of the West Coast. Enacting the virtue of clarity prized and defended by her explicitly philosophical work, this poetry is both resonant and integrated. It is also formally diverse, ranging from the singular focus of the lyric ode to suites of variations and fugal structures, from polyphonic textures to the sprawling reach of narrative gestures. Throughout, one feels the deft hand of an adept using powerful metaphors to explore themes of colonial violence, environmental devastation, spiritual catastrophe, and transformation. Resisting Western philosophy’s exclusion of imagination from civic life, Zwicky’s poetry is noteworthy for the tension it achieves between the abstract and the personal, the general and the particular. Meditating repeatedly on themes of love and grief, this poetry is at once passionately committed to the lucidity of its utterances and the fidelity of its images.
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Price: $22.99
Pages: 102
Publisher: Wilfrid Laurier University Press
Imprint: Wilfrid Laurier University Press
Series: Laurier Poetry
Publication Date: 11 December 2014
Trim Size: 9.00 X 6.00 in
ISBN: 9781771120913
Format: Paperback
BISACs: LITERARY CRITICISM / Canadian
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Jan Zwicky’s books of poetry include Songs for Relinquishing the Earth, which won the Governor General’s Award, Robinson’s Crossing, which won the Dorothy Livesay Prize, and, most recently Forge, which was short-listed for the Griffin Prize. Her books of philosophy include Wisdom & Metaphor, Lyric Philosophy, and Alkibiades’ Love (forthcoming 2015).
|Darren Bifford is the author of Wedding in Fire Country (2012) and Hermit Crab ( 2014). He lives in Montreal.
|Warren Heiti lives in Halifax, where he has taught at Dalhousie University and St. Mary’s University. He is currently a teaching fellow at the University of King’s College. He is the author of Hydrologos (2011).

Table of Contents for Chamber Music: The Poetry of Jan Zwicky, selected with an introduction by Darren Bifford and Warren Heiti
Foreword, Neil Besner
Biographical Note
Introduction
Practising Bach
Language Is Hands
from Leaving Home
from Seven Elegies: Robert William Zwicky (1927-1987)
The Horse Pull
Your Body
K. 219, Adagio
The Geology of Norway
Brahms' Clarinet Quintet in B Minor, Op. 115
Cashion Bridge
Bill Evans: "Here's That Rainy Day"
Beethoven: Op. 95
Driving Northwest
Prairie
Epistemology
One Version
Robinson's Crossing
History
Another Version
Glenn Gould: Bach's "Italian" Concerto, BWV 971
Small song in praise of ears
Small song for the voice of the nuthatch
Small song: Prairie
Small song to oneself
Small song:Mozart
Small song: Laundry
from Music and Silence: Seven Variations
Late Schubert
Practising Bach
Gemini
If There Were Two Rivers
From Distant Lands
The Art of Fugue
Schumann: Fantasie, Op. 17
Autobiography
Autumn Again
An Abridgement of a Conversation with Jan Zwicky
Acknowledgements