You can't enter the past — it's true — but there are towlines that steady you alongside. Their unravelling renders tomorrow indistinct. Anne Compton's fourth collection, Alongs
You can't enter the past — it's true — but there are towlines that steady you alongside.
Their unravelling renders tomorrow indistinct. from "Shoreland"
Anne Compton's fourth collection,
Alongside, tells an unexpected love story, a celebration of beauty which begins in the mind and wanders out into the garden and back again through the library. It is a story that moves between the wild and the domestic. Beauty, like the figure of the fox that appears and re-appears here, is joyous and elusive, glimpsed and gone. Every poem in the book is a conversation, with other writers, with lovers, with books, and an Island past. A conversation about the way in which the unlived life always walks beside us.
Anne Compton
is a two-time winner of the Atlantic Poetry Prize and winner of the Governor General's Literary Award for Poetry for her second collection, Processional. In 2008, she was awarded the Alden Nowlan Award for Excellence in English Language Literary Arts. A former teacher and writer-in-residence at the University of New Brunswick at Saint John, she developed and directed the acclaimed Lorenzo Reading Series.
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"Every so often, one comes across a poet and sees what makes poetry, poetry. With a sudden flash of recognition, the reader stands before the cosmic stage and confronts all that is there. Anne Compton in Alongside writes masterfully about the exhilarating freedom of childhood memories, love expressed in a personal cartography and in the imaginative revelation of the history of a house and its former inhabitants. She writes with subtle music, startling analogies, extraordinary metaphors, les mots justes — blended in an orchestral arrangement with keen intelligence, powerful emotion and exquisite craft — all waiting for the reader to discover."
— Jury for Raymond Souster Award
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League of Canadian Poets's Raymond Souster Award winner, 2014
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