February 7, 2011 - 6:19am
Governor General’s Award-winning poet Erín Moure will read at Vancouver Island University Monday, Feb. 14, at 4 pm.
The event takes place in the Nanaimo Campus Library Writing Centre, and is open to the public.
Admission is by donation. Following the readings, there will be cookies, coffee and conversation.
Moure is a Montreal poet whose work, considered experimental, has received several Canadian literary awards including the Pat Lowther Award, the Governor General’s Award for Poetry and the A.M. Klein Prize for Poetry. She was also short-listed for the 2006 Griffin Prize for her own work, and for the 2002 and 2008 Griffin Prizes for her poetry translations of Nicole Brossard (with Robert Majzels) from French and Fernando Pessoa from Portuguese.
In her most recent books, O Cadoiro (Anansi) and O Resplandor (House of Anansi), poetry becomes hybrid. In O Resplandor, the question arises: Is the author Elisa Sampedrín or Moure? Both seem invented in the process of dealing with grief.
O Cadoiro blends the authorial voice through theoretical reflections with personal experience (a story of impossible love), and a meticulous mind into the old Galician-Portuguese cantigas —a medieval form of poetry. In both cases, the names of the poets blur, sexes are indeterminate, modern and ancient levels of language co-exist, the palimpsest is pockmarked, and we sometimes don't know any more who sings of melancholy: it must be the book.
On Feb. 14, Moure will read from O Resplandor, a collection well-suited to the date.
Moure describes O Resplandor as being “about the love of reading — a love so fierce that it forces a person to translate from languages they don’t even know, just to be able to read. And, it’s about friendship, which is perhaps the most powerful love of all.”
Examples of Erin Moure's poetry can be found online:
http://www.library.utoronto.ca/canpoetry/moure/poem1.htm
The Poets on Campus series is sponsored by VIU's Department of Creative Writing, Faculty Association and Dean of Arts and Humanities and supported by Canada Council for the Arts, the League of Canadian Poets and the Writers' Union of Canada.
Moure also reads Feb. 10 at Emily Carr University, Vancouver; Feb. 15 at North Island College (Courtenay); and Feb. 16 at the Poetry Gabriola Reading Series (Gabriola Island)
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For more information, contact Poets on Campus student co-ordinator Emily Smythe: es.smythe@gmail.com
For more information on readings in the series, visit: viu.ca/poetsoncampus/schedule.asp
Tags: In the Community
