The Best Canadian Poetry in English, 2011 is published this month by Tightrope Books.
From Priscila Uppal’s opening essay:
“If I have a critical bias, which I suppose everyone does as much as we try to remain as objective as possible, I admire poetry that surprises and challenges, that offers a new perspective or piece of wisdom I haven’t previously considered, that interrogates and innovates poetic conventions and genres and reverses the expected, either in terms of subject matter or language or form, or provokes unconventional emotions, that welcomes other fields of knowledge and art forms and methodologies, that reminds me of something important I seem to have forgotten or puts an entirely new thought in my head, that stuns me with exquisite beauty or sadness or profundity or ecstasy, poetry with a vision—whether pessimistic or idealistic—with something at stake, something to prove, something to lose, something to gain.”
From Molly Peacock’s Introduction:
All poets are asked to define poetry—by students, by mystified readers, and by poetry initiates as well—and all poets muster their own ways to describe their own art. Yet many of us feel that the way we describe the art we practice is inadequate to the enterprise itself. The poem is a hint, a charge, a shock, a rattle, a victory, a tendril, a touch. This anthology, so astutely and lovingly selected by Priscila Uppal, provides poetry—or, simply put, “patterned language”—with fifty electric definitions. There is always, even in the most abstract and prickly poem, the sense of a hand extending. The voice may be gruff, or seductive, or brittle, or far, far away, but in a tactile sense, that poem reaches toward you. And you come toward it, drawn to the ineffable.
Here's one of Uppal's excellent choices for The Best Canadian Poetry in English 2011:
Michelle Barker
Black Sheep
In the end I can tell you
being the black sheep
of the family
is not what it promises
you imagine
motorcycle bad boys
an enticing tattoo
whiskey straight up
an electric guitar
and of course
sideways looks from the family
that secretly you think
you would savour
but it isn’t like that
it is a door
closing on family gatherings
babies born
without you –
you get the details second hand
it is seeing the wedding photos
on e-mail
(they couldn’t invite you –
it would have caused a scene)
it is a bell ringing far away
summoning others
and more specifically
not you
it is your name
whispered
or forgotten
and so yet again you stiffen
your upper lip
take your stand
(for a worthy cause)
tell yourself that renegade
has a certain ring to it
and quietly draw the curtains
on the small window
facing home.
The Best Canadian Poetry in English, 2011 will be launched on October 26, 7:00 pm, at Revival, 783 College St, Toronto.