Away
- Publisher
- Signature Editions
- Initial publish date
- Mar 2008
- Category
- Canadian
-
Paperback / softback
- ISBN
- 9781897109236
- Publish Date
- Mar 2008
- List Price
- $14.95
Classroom Resources
Where to buy it
Description
Andrea MacPherson takes us on a grand tour of Europe, where the vast legacy of human history combines with her own ancestral origins to make a mark on her. In reaction, MacPherson assembles suites of deft, personal lyrics for each country. These poems consider the state of estrangement from the familiar and the shock of history's impress. Whether she is crossing the uneasy if commonplace border between north and south Ireland, visiting the ruins of a jute mill where her Scottish great-grandmother once worked, stopping for a kir on a ruelle in Montparnasse, or voyaging out by ferry into blue clarities of the Aegean, MacPherson is a traveller always aware of how her perceptions and her selfare being shaped. In this book of quiet beauty and careful observation, MacPherson seeks to re-invent the travel poem on her own terms.
About the author
Andrea MacPherson is the author of six books: three novels, What We Once Believed, Beyond the Blue, and When She Was Electric, and three poetry collections, Ellipses, Away, and Natural Disasters. When She Was Electric placed number 6 on CBC Canada Reads: People’s Choice, and Natural Disasters was longlisted for the ReLit Awards.
Her poetry was anthologized in the UK publication, How the Light Gets In, and she has been a runner up in both Grain Magazine’s Short Grain Award, and Prism International’s Poetry Award.
Born in Vancouver, Andrea was raised in the lower mainland. Andrea holds an MFA from the Creative Writing Department at the University of British Columbia, where she was Editor of Prism International. She has also acted as the Reviews Editor for Event Magazine. Currently an Associate Professor at the University of the Fraser Valley, Andrea teaches creative writing and literature.
Excerpt: Away (by (author) Andrea MacPherson)
THROUGH THE KEYHOLE
Strange, this obsession with doors.
Captive doors. Execution-yard doors. The doors of schoolhouses. Homes. Bathhouse doors.
I’ll return home with a full roll of pictures: green, red, blue sometimes black or brown.
Never photos of people entering or leaving. Never faces, dark boots, pale hands. Just the solid reminder that something waits behind.
(If you catch the right light, you can almost see it through the keyhole.)
BLUE SALT
At eleven, my mother swam in an outdoor pool in Arbroath. She had come for grieving, but instead found tight bands of blue held above her head, broom surrounding the water.
They stayed in a caravan, avoiding the seaport where her mother had grown up, where her grandmother had died while they were hovering over the Atlantic. Landing, her mother cried, sagging against their broken suitcases, and my mother held her arm. Felt sorrow most in the soft skin there.
They spent days in Broughty Ferry, listening to the cry of gulls, and peering in store windows; or Carnoustie where they ate at tiny fish shops where my mother learned the texture of gills.
Her mother left with only a rose-gold wedding band, a few porcelain figurines: dogs, women in fancy dress, lambs. And my mother took with her the memory of water, smoked fish on her tongue.
FIRA CATS
The low slink of a cat beneath an outdoor table. They are drawn to our plates of fish, skeleton intact and the low light covering Fira. Torches blaze around the perimeter, as if feral cats might be turned feaful.
Fear is only for the tame.
Here, the spines of cats are more apparent than their coats. Mangy. Matted. They move between tables in hope, perhaps aware of the empathy in travellers who witness ancient shipwrecks.
This morning we watched a man pretend to drown in an outdoor pool. Feigned distress, his gurgled English broken with Dutch, as he mocked those swallowed by the Aegean.
Small felines sunk in boats heavy with cargo. Fear only reaching them as they first learned the taste of salt the thick cut of it through fur.
Editorial Reviews
"Spare, elegant? [MacPherson's assured, sensual debut reveals much about the secrets women keep and the hidden desires that propel us to action and stop us in our tracks."?Booklist on When She Was Electric "Natural Disasters captures the core of Andrea MacPherson's Scots-Irish Canadian heritage."?George McWhirter