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Poetry Canadian

The Night Chorus

by (author) Harold Hoefle

Publisher
McGill-Queen's University Press
Initial publish date
Aug 2018
Category
Canadian
  • Paperback / softback

    ISBN
    9780773554924
    Publish Date
    Sep 2018
    List Price
    $19.95
  • eBook

    ISBN
    9780773555921
    Publish Date
    Aug 2018
    List Price
    $16.95

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Description

A whistling through teeth. / He shuts his eyes but still sees / the red glow of exit signs.

Harold Hoefle's The Night Chorus rises out of forests and country roads, bars and buses, cities and small towns. These locales are the haunts of outsiders ranging from travellers and farmers to a soldier, a drug addict, a refugee, and the murdered. The past clings in these stark, evocative poems, "memory a closet of clothes / that hang from bent wire."

In the tradition of songwriters like Gordon Lightfoot and Gord Downie and poets such as Al Purdy, Karen Solie, and David O'Meara, The Night Chorus presents so-called "obscure" lives, where dark and playful humour collides with historic and mythic characters including Ovid and Dante, Odysseus and Desdemona. Using lyric poetry and the ghazal, the prose poem and the elegy, The Night Chorus brims with images as sharp as wild geese scrawling letters against an evening sky and as humble as "pots of plum dumplings and still-warm soup."

Bookended by a sequence of lyrics inspired by cross-country road trips, Hoefle references iconic places like Black Dog Road and Seldom Seen and peoples the landscape with imagined characters. Their voices – damaged, rough, intimate – will echo in the reader's mind.

About the author

Harold Hoefle teaches English and Creative Writing at John Abbott College. He lives in Montreal.

Harold Hoefle's profile page