Tonja Gunvaldsen Klaassen’s second poetry collection has the condensed intensity of light from old stars. Like a slow, multifoliate explosion, her metaphors track the luminous traces left by the mind as it flows into and away from the life of the body. She is a poet’s poet: her images are emblematic of the inner and outer worlds that both shadow and illuminate everyday life.

Lost thoughts, soot-lined, silver-lined concatenations incense of coal, cumulonimbus… pennies and ponies on the track heads or tails, a chance the sleeper lugged backwards through France, honey-moon, lune de miel suite, sigh, tunnel of tickets and black gates, fate line rising from the luna mount mind the gap a porter calls and we cross, linked elbow to elbow ghost cars sparking the synaptic tracks…

– from “Trains”

Gunvaldsen Klaassen’s universe is as elusive as the quantum physicist’s, where particles flash in and out of existence. Yet the shimmering quality of these poems is hooked to the earth by nouns of astonishment: “Belts, boots, spurs, stars” “sepals, stamens, catkins, matchsticks” There is nothing ordinary about the trajectory of human existence, as these poems prove time and again.

Tonja Gunvaldsen Klaassen was born in Saskatoon in 1968. She spent her childhood first in Calgary, and later on a farm in Saskatchewan. Her first collection Clay Birds won the Saskatchewan Book Award for Poetry in 1996. She now lives in Halifax with her husband James and their two small sons.

Tonja Gunvalden Klaassen's profile page

• Long-listed, ReLit Awards
• Short-listed, Pat Lowther Award

Halifax poet Tonja Gunvaldsen Klaassen’s second collection, Ör (Old Norse for ‘arrow’), presents a poetry propelled by intuition and physicality.

Event

Above all, this is music. Gunvaldsen Klaassen employs lists to this end, pleasing to the eye, and to the tongue and ear as well... Cerebral and embodied, Or is a lovely and often surprising book that redeems the synaptic jumping of the modern “monkey mind.”

Globe and Mail