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Poetry Canadian

Ink Monkey

Poems

by (author) Diana Hartog

Publisher
Brick Books
Initial publish date
Feb 2006
Category
Canadian
  • eBook

    ISBN
    9781771311380
    Publish Date
    Sep 2006
    List Price
    $11.99
  • Paperback / softback

    ISBN
    9781894078504
    Publish Date
    Feb 2006
    List Price
    $18.00

Classroom Resources

Where to buy it

Description

“like Emily Dickinson, Hartog melds the ordinary with the visionary.” — Joseph Stroud, author of Below Cold Mountain and Country of Light

Ink Monkey is Diana Hartog's first book of poetry in more than thirteen years, and her patience is the reader's reward. In these spare and elegant poems — not a word out of place, not an unnecessary syllable — Hartog turns a perceptive eye toward the stories of seemingly ordinary things, of overlooked moments and long-closed rooms. Whether she is writing about jellyfish, the desert, awkward silences that end a relationship, struggles of creativity, or Japanese prints, her poems are astute and beautiful.

 

Something “up his sleeve,” as when a man in the West simply
leans against a wall with his hands in his pockets

 

and a woman walks by, her starched French cuff dangling an
abalone button blinded with thread. The Muse leaning also,

 

towards the East and the past: the poetic looseness of kimono sleeves,
damp with tears, in the Japanese canon of love. Sweet partings, trysts,

 

exposing always the wrist, its pale throat, the heartbeat's
muted throb at the fork of the two blue rivers “

from “Sleeves?

 

?Give Diana Hartog a subject — monkeys, frogs, jellyfish, or a Japanese printmaker on the Tokaido road — and she will play riffs that dazzle “. With an adhesive poet's tongue, Hartog picks through her seemingly endless erudition for the humorous bits — Leda in a hotel room leaving her feathers in the ashtray — and yet she can crack the heart, as in the image 'the grass — whipped every-which-way as if wild with grief. “'” — Rosemary Sullivan

About the author

Diana Hartog lives in New Denver, B.C. Her first book, Matinee Light, won the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award from the League of Canadian Poets. Of that book critics said:`Hartog`s perceptions of human nature are astute, intelligent and delightfully sympathetic to the human condition.` - Kinesis `The world of these poems is one of flickering but very sharp images, much like the moving pictures of her California childhood,.. the afternoons of matinee light.` Sharon Thesen, Line`A beautifully constructed, disciplined first collection, filled with ironic wit, sensual vitality and subtlety.`- Malahat Review

Diana Hartog's profile page

Editorial Reviews

"Ink Monkey ... acquaints us with an intelligence that generates quirky, surprising and vivid images ... all of Hartog is worth reading!"--George Elliott Clarke, Halifax Chronicle-Herald

"There's something mirage-like about Hartog's poems. They encourage the reader to look, then look again."--Barabara Carey, The Toronto Star

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