sewn paper
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POETRY
March 2008
48 pages
EAN 978-0-88984-305-9
$12.95
Taking Shape
Edward Carson
Taking Shape is about love, its powerful personal history, its public geography and geology, how it changes, how it shifts itself into different forms and temporalities, and how love profoundly alters an individual's point of view and the world at large. Through love we belong to, and are separate from each other in ways like no other parts and phases of our existence; through it the language of our imaginations are nourished and transformed. Like nature's elusive electrons, the paths love takes are continually altered and given new direction by the knowledge, questions and feelings we bring to it. Finally, Taking Shape is also about the nature of shape, how the very form or vessel, like language itself, persuades us to take on as well as escape from the many breathtaking landscapes and mysteries, clues and possibilities of our shared lives. `Love, the argument goes, is not a force that can be contained: Ed Carson's
poems don't attempt to bind the un-bindable -- they approximate love's
flavour, turning outward to the other and inward to the self, and also
wandering among love's mysteries, This meditation on love over time rewards
re-reading:
the reach for the divine is threaded through with human failings: these strike me
as not only graceful, but truthful poems.' `Edward Carson's linked poems praise at once the logic
of love and the place of love. Taking Shape
combines his elegance of style and imagination
(think of a musical composition) with the immediacy
of the erotic. A rare performance.' `Ed Carson's linked poems, Taking Shape, rising and
falling in easy cadences, examine how things take shape in
the world. Yet for all their fluidity, these
poems have a blade-sharp edge. Showing us ``held together in a fierce ring of
light'', they reveal, poignantly, what it is that makes us human.' `Ed Carson's Taking Shape is a gem. In this new book of
interconnected poems, in an attempt to name what love is, to
give it a shape that can be grasped, like a metaphysical
lapidarist he facets and re-facets its language so that the
light it reveals refracts and reflects within it and ``exceeds
its reason for being''.
We come away believing in the shape of something with no shape at all.' `Edward Carson's Taking Shape is a feast of immanent
thinking. It shows that time-worn tools can indeed, when
used with patience, sensitivity, rigour, and devotion, yield
pleasures rare and contemporary.' `Edward Carson's Taking Shape is a subtle meditation on love and
change, lovers caught up in the changes and rhythms of life on this
mortal earth. The elegant couplets repeat phrases, words, and images to
hypnotic effect. In a manner reminiscent of E. D. Blodgett's
Apostrophes -- yet entirely its own -- Taking Shape in its play on
repetition and variation traces ``the faint / shape of things taking
shape,'' evoking the weather of love.' `Within Ed Carson's grave meditation on love we can hear sounding
the ghost of our old, stately, inexhaustible pentameter. As his measured
words resonate and rhyme, accumulating weight, so do his ideas. This is
mature poetry that appeals to both the heart and the head -- accomplished,
thoughtful, and moving.' `With evocative imagery and the keen eye of a photographer,
Carson gives shape to a language of the heart.'
-- Marilyn Bowering, author of What It Takes To Be Human
-- Robert Kroetsch, author of The Hornbooks of Rita K
-- Anne Simpson, author of Loop and Quick
-- Brian Henderson, author of Nerve Language
-- Mark Truscott, author of Said Like Reeds or Things
-- Hilary Clark, author of The Dwelling of Weather
-- Keith Maillard, author of Gloria
-- Christopher Dewdney, author of Signal Fires
Throughout his publishing career he taught the business of publishing at Ryerson University, Humber College, and as co-director of the Banff Publishing Workshop. He also has participated on various Boards of Directors, including PEN Canada, BookNet Canada, and is a past president of the Canadian Publishers' Council. At present he is Chief Business Officer and Associate Director, University of Toronto, School of Continuing Studies.
