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    Seven Into Even
    Seven Into Even
    Seven Into Even
    Ebook93 pages27 minutes

    Seven Into Even

    By Jacqueline Turner

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    About this ebook

    Seven Into Even reworks Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene in counterpoint to the seven deadly sins, and brings these vast references through a mesh of contemporary settings and issues in a series of poetic installations. The number seven works as an organizing principle: the book struggles with narrative and its constraints, questioning the development of characters as a poetic device, and reflecting on itself as it builds.

    Seven Into Even is prose poetry at light speed, intermingled with the luscious slowness of short line leaps. Its seven sections explore the geographical spaciousness and local landscapes of Canada. Jacqueline Turner walks her poems through the handful of streets that make up Vancouver’s Horseshoe Bay, to the Ship & Anchor in Calgary, and invites them to notice the way the sidewalks curve and cars stop for pedestrians — even if they’re jaywalking. Her characters are unsure and ambivalent — and yet confident enough to highlight the fallacies of knowledge, reality, and truth.

    The scale of Turner’s project is both daunting and paradoxical. Like Spenser, she considers the differences between appearance and reality, probing them for resonance. She records the noises that emanate beyond the surface of things, building intensities through the thrill and push of language as it rushes across the page. By playfully mixing genres, this book undoes the distinction between high and low art with an exciting series of linguistic collisions.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherECW Press
    Release dateOct 1, 2006
    ISBN9781554902774
    Seven Into Even

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      Book preview

      Seven Into Even - Jacqueline Turner

      Acknowledgements

      BOOK 1

      Constant Mind

      You play words across technical pages

      Your form constrained by hour and look

      While hiding she pops forth with imaginary goldfish

      That you definitely can’t eat or maybe you can

      You work three jobs fall asleep exhausted

      To the sound of someone reading dark words

      And dream of what abandoned coasts can offer

      Antique Times

      You brush dust off the surface where the TVused to sit

      Wax nostalgic for half a second you might bite your lip

      Forget remembering a breath at the back of your neck

      Hands cupping your breasts from behind, no you have

      Moved on into another cream-coloured room where

      Your desire can be measured in typical terms like

      Groceries and renovations and batteries for clocks

      That have recently stopped

      Strong Compulsion

      Mine too: it should be reasonably confessed

      Because you know what they say about confession

      And my days are measured out by coffee and breakfast

      Dropping off one boy and then the other: Jimi Hendrix

      This morning and Deep Purple tomorrow today I’m craving

      Leonard Cohen again and you can only listen to so much Dear Heather

      Before your chest aches with the want of what you cannot have

      Because you simply didn’t choose it

      Who First Should Be

      Walking the handful of streets that make up Horseshoe Bay

      Where the dog does her trick for the last tourists of the season

      We forgot to rent a boat this summer or didn’t have time

      Forgot to plant the pots and read books instead while you

      Contemplated a life ruined by reading or soap operas

      We kept making up romantic pen names for future romances

      Arguing to ourselves that it had to pay off in the end

      Gentle Wise

      Your blueness sparkles up the hill to Tantalus Park

      Always wanting less than you need around the green

      Corner while I keep linking words to desires without

      The reach forward to grab your hand tightly because I will not be known or seen: almost invisible and cryptic

      Snake skin shedding that shimmery trace you pick up

      And examine closely through the light

      Running Sore

      When the dark days hit answering the phone

      Is an impossible task and your message about

      The smell of the showers at the Y fizzures through

      And even though I don’t call back the smell

      Conjures around the rest of the day and even though

      I can’t sleep tonight or any night my

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