The publication of Anne Compton's first two collections marked the arrival of a major voice in Canadian poetry. In this, her third collection, she completes the island trilogy that those two books beg
ContentsI The way beached boats are both / On land and partly in water…
What light decays
The Pass throughMorning
Stars, Sunday Dawn
November, April, June
Afternoon furniture, winter
Visiting Parents, 6 January
The excellent humour of trees
The storm, the day you died
II Seven men who can give a discreet answer
The age we discover poetry
Houseguest
WithWingspread Ease
Fall-back Sunday
Louisa reading, me driving by
Reading, while the baby sleeps
Summer Storm
III God is not angry with you; you are angry with God
What matters
Any given angel
Poetry and Belief
Raspberries
TheWaitingWell
Birdlore
Winter Scene with Postulants
The Provost Responds
Within and around
Even now
The Garden, aquatic
What day brings forth, 1 January
In the Parson’s Herbary
IV Think that we / Are but turned aside to sleep…
The IntelligentMan’s Guide to the Shore
If Only
What splendid times
Asleep
Trains
Love, after a time
Bodies of water
The rustling of stars
There waits a room
The Second Truck
Restless HotelMorning
The Library, Nova Scotia
V The Third Stranger / Ways of saying goodbye
Every story has its horizon
After theWar
Wash rules, winter, c 1950
Electricity
Quiet
Travel
August Apples, Also Called Yellow Transparents
140 acres lying south from the watermark
The men are here
In the slope
Through John Thompson Country
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"Compton shows an allegiance to the classics in the rhythmic cadences of her lines, her deft metaphors based on the natural world and in her attention to time-honoured subjects such as love and mortality. She's a cultivated writer, but there's a seam of the down-to-earth under her fingernails, too. She hasn't lost touch with the land (and sea) of her P.E.I. upbringing."
—
The Toronto Star"[A] rigorously intelligent work about the pains and glories of life and nature"
— The Globe and Mail
"A warm collection, as Compton uses the architectural details of home and heart to evoke presences now gone."
— Winnipeg Free Press
"Compton is not querulous, not browbeating; she's just seeking the measure of self, and in poem after poem, this measure expands in cumulative answering, giving a revealing and stoic portrait of the sponsoring imagination. Respecting the question is another way of respecting the self, and poems have a way of betraying the injudicious. A mark of real poetry is that every word should count. Here, every question counts.
— Fiddlehead
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Winner of the Governor General's Award for Poetry, and the Atlantic Poetry Prize
"Anne Compton's Processional is both a still-life and a tableau, with moments of perfect stillness and of passionate arrival. This book skillfully marries history to the present, and pulls the everyday into light."
- Judges' citation, Governor General's Literary Award for Poetry, 2005
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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. She teaches at the University of New Brunswick at Saint John.
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