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    A Page from the Wonders of Life on Earth
    A Page from the Wonders of Life on Earth
    A Page from the Wonders of Life on Earth
    Ebook83 pages26 minutes

    A Page from the Wonders of Life on Earth

    By Stephanie Bolster

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    About this ebook

    Shortlisted for the 2012 Pat Lowther Memorial Award

    An ambivalent zoo-tour, an open-eyed meander through a landscape of made and contained things.

    A Page from The Wonders of Life on Earth is a book with a coherent vision of nature -- constructed or framed, both in the present and in the recent past -- through zoos, aviaries, formal gardens, menageries, and books like the Time-Life one named in the title. Informed by the author’s grand tour of these zoos and gardens, these poems provide a strong lens for considering the many paradoxes of inter-species relations; they open up the possibility of honest, unsentimental elegy. The book is also a model of what might be called investigative poetry, taking the poet’s combination of perceptual acuity, craft, music and sensibility into these richly troubled places (prisons of, monuments to, museums for the lost natural world) where "arcades sell postcards of old photographs of the arcades," and where questions of what it means to be human, to be animal, to be other and to be art are tangibly in the air. This is Bolster's best work.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBrick Books
    Release dateSep 15, 2011
    ISBN9781771310819
    A Page from the Wonders of Life on Earth
    Author

    Stephanie Bolster

    Stephanie Bolster's first book, White Stone: The Alice Poems, won the Governor General’'s and the Gerald Lampert Awards in 1998. She has published two other collections, Two Bowls of Milk, which won the Archibald Lampman Award, and Pavilion. Raised in Burnaby, B.C., she now teaches at Concordia University and lives in Pointe-Claire, Quebec.

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      Book preview

      A Page from the Wonders of Life on Earth - Stephanie Bolster

      A PAGE FROM THE WONDERS OF LIFE ON EARTH

      A PAGE FROM THE WONDERS OF LIFE ON EARTH

      STEPHANIE BOLSTER

      Brick Books

      Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

      Bolster, Stephanie

      A page from the wonders of life on Earth / Stephanie Bolster.

      Poems.

      ISBN 978-1-926829-70-8

      I. Title.

      PS8553.O479P35 2011             C811’.54             C2011-904254-1

      Copyright © Stephanie Bolster, 2011

      We acknowledge the Canada Council for the Arts, the Government

      of Canada through the Canada Book Fund, and the Ontario Arts

      Council for their support of our publishing program.

      The cover image is a detail from Belted Kingfisher,

      by Susan Bozic (www.susanbozic.com).

      The author photo was taken by Thomas Bolster.

      Brick Books

      Box 20081

      431 Boler Road

      London, Ontario

      N6K 4G6

      Canada

      www.brickbooks.ca

      For Madeleine and Éloïse

      who weren’t and are

      Contents

      Life of the Mind (Wanders)

      Foundations

      Arènes de Lutèce

      Versailles

      The Invention of Distraction

      Comfort

      Life of the Mind (Wonders)

      Iron

      Palm House, Kew

      Glass

      Crystal Palace

      Life of the Mind (Tapestry)

      Awake

      Lingua Botanica

      The Garden of Augustus the Strong

      Eden or Ark

      An Education

      Eye of the Beholder

      Life of the Mind (Dear)

      Red Light District

      Hello, You

      Lady Giraffe

      Domesticity Revisited

      Life of the Mind (Task)

      Tapestry, The Cloisters

      Stuffed Stuff

      What Art

      The Cloisters

      Stella’s Brooklyn Bridge Means New York

      A Visit to the Children’s Zoo

      Frick Collection

      Life of the Mind (Turn)

      The Gardens of Capability Brown

      Brussels Zoo

      Still Life with Mouse and Candle

      Date Lament

      Last Days of the Crystal Palace

      Biodôme

      Life of the Mind (Overcast)

      Amsterdam

      London, February 1963

      Three Zoos

      Nancy, France

      Beyond Saint Petersburg

      Home

      Life of the Mind (Constellations)

      Topiary

      Tanyosho Pines

      A Brief History of the Bear Pit in the Ménagerie du Jardin des Plantes

      In the Solarium

      The Last Animal

      Life of the Mind (Sanctuary)

      Property

      Tended Meadow

      Song for the Song of the Aviary

      Rainbow

      When We Stop Visiting

      Housing the Great Auk

      A Page from The Wonders of Life on Earth

      Life of the Mind (Night)

      Notes

      Acknowledgements

      Biographical Note

      At the entrance to the arcade, a mailbox: a last opportunity to make some sign to the world one

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