In this eagerly anticipated follow-up to his award-winning, critically lauded debut, Rob Winger's sophomore collection, The Chimney Stone, bends the contemporary lyric into startling new shapes. Concentrating on a splendid mess of headlines, wars, politics, relationships and artistic influences, Winger's ghazals ask us how to negotiate the complex commitments and chaotic tumult of our daily lives. Making use of the ghazal's original address to both a secular lover and a sacred ethics, Winger's four sections move from examinations of gender in "Iron John" and "Bloody Mary", to an ironic investigation of common experience in "Idiot Wind", to a record of both human rights abuses and personal epiphany in "Blind Date". In the process, Winger not only engages in dialogue with other poets -- John Thompson, Phyllis Webb, Adrienne Rich, Ghalib and more -- but also welcomes other voices, measures, and musical phrases into his couplets. Here, Rimbaud rubs shoulders with Joe Strummer and David Byrne; Dylan exchanges one-liners with Gaston Bachelard; Johnny Cash spars with the Fisk Jubilee Singers; and Gretzky makes a pass to a smooth right winger. Drifting from razor-carved sternums, to Lhasa runways, to Southeast Asian temples and beaches, to eighteenth-century shipwrecks, bloody tanks, rusty apartheid, blind genocide and burning teddy bears, the book urges us to re-examine not only how we order the contemporary world, but also how we become its citizens or revolutionaries, grandparents or kids, protestors or politicians. Ethically charged, tenderly observed, and masterfully realised, Winger's poems are a vital addition to the ghazal's continued evolution.
Rob Winger's first book, Muybridge's Horse, was a Globe and Mail best book, shortlisted for the Governor General's Award, Ottawa Book Award, and Trillium Book Award for Poetry, and won a CBC Literary Award. His critically acclaimed second collection was The Chimney Stone. Born and raised in small-town Ontario, Rob currently lives in the hills northeast of Toronto, where he teaches at Trent University.
Show moreIn this eagerly anticipated follow-up to his award-winning, critically lauded debut, Rob Winger's sophomore collection, The Chimney Stone, bends the contemporary lyric into startling new shapes. Concentrating on a splendid mess of headlines, wars, politics, relationships and artistic influences, Winger's ghazals ask us how to negotiate the complex commitments and chaotic tumult of our daily lives. Making use of the ghazal's original address to both a secular lover and a sacred ethics, Winger's four sections move from examinations of gender in "Iron John" and "Bloody Mary", to an ironic investigation of common experience in "Idiot Wind", to a record of both human rights abuses and personal epiphany in "Blind Date". In the process, Winger not only engages in dialogue with other poets -- John Thompson, Phyllis Webb, Adrienne Rich, Ghalib and more -- but also welcomes other voices, measures, and musical phrases into his couplets. Here, Rimbaud rubs shoulders with Joe Strummer and David Byrne; Dylan exchanges one-liners with Gaston Bachelard; Johnny Cash spars with the Fisk Jubilee Singers; and Gretzky makes a pass to a smooth right winger. Drifting from razor-carved sternums, to Lhasa runways, to Southeast Asian temples and beaches, to eighteenth-century shipwrecks, bloody tanks, rusty apartheid, blind genocide and burning teddy bears, the book urges us to re-examine not only how we order the contemporary world, but also how we become its citizens or revolutionaries, grandparents or kids, protestors or politicians. Ethically charged, tenderly observed, and masterfully realised, Winger's poems are a vital addition to the ghazal's continued evolution.
Rob Winger's first book, Muybridge's Horse, was a Globe and Mail best book, shortlisted for the Governor General's Award, Ottawa Book Award, and Trillium Book Award for Poetry, and won a CBC Literary Award. His critically acclaimed second collection was The Chimney Stone. Born and raised in small-town Ontario, Rob currently lives in the hills northeast of Toronto, where he teaches at Trent University.
Show moreRob Winger grew up in small-town Ontario. His first book, Muybridges Horse, was named a Globe and Mail Best Book for 2007, and was shortlisted for the Governor Generals Award, Ottawa Book Award and Trillium Book Award for Poetry. An active editor and teacher, Rob completed a PhD in literature and cultural studies in Ottawa. His second collection of poetry, a book of ghazals, was The Chimney Stone. Rob lives in the hills northeast of Toronto, where he teaches English at Trent University. Visit Rob's website at http://www.robwinger.blogspot.com/
With an assortment of award winning work already before him, Rob
Winger brings readers another fine volume with "The Chimney Stone".
Thoughtful work as he discusses what's hot on the tongues of people
today, he offers unique perspectives in the form of entertaining
verse. "The Chimney Stone" is an excellent addition to any
collection.
--James A. Cox, The Midwest Book Review
The Chimney Stone at first seems to be a book about love, then
suddenly a book about influence (perhaps the influence of love and
a love of one's influences) and finally, a book that parses the
often testy question of inspiration in its most basic, arcane, and
visceral senses. There's great skill here line to line, word to
word, but the quiet directness of the poems is what shines; art not
just the nod to other art it always is, but a doorway to tackling
the larger problems of being.
--Kevin Connolly, author
I love the playfulness of The Chimney Stone ... [t]here is whimsy
and humour in the titles, such as Ghazal for the Blonde on Blonde
Blues, Ghazal for Gazelles (of course!) ... and in the poems
themselves, which include bits of lyric beauty but are not reverent
and distant. I think what I enjoy most about this form, and Rob
Winger does this so successfully, is the feeling that, although the
couplets are not linked, they are, very gently linked to one
another.
--The Literary Blog of Amanda Earl
Long an admirer of the North American ghazal, Rob Winger ... adds
his own voice to the storm. His is a thoughtful form, speaking to
an entire list of previous practitioners ... and innumerable
musical references. [W]hat Winger brings is a collage effect to his
pieces, tight lines that allow a breath of flexibility, scattered
but held together, but not tight enough to confine, or choke.
--rob mclennan's blog
Winger's phrasing is lively and often richly metaphorical ... the
poems in this book lay down an elliptical, zigzag path of tenuous
connections and startling leaps in which room for the reader's
imagination is, in effect, part of the composition.
―Barbara Carey, The Toronto Star
Rob Winger writes wonderful poems--musical, precise and insistent.
In The Chimney Stone, Winger lovingly dismantles some great songs
and uses their salvaged parts to build a surprising, beautiful new
kind of lyric on the frame of an old one. It is a remarkable feat
of empathy and nerve.
--John K. Samson, The Weakerthans
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