sewn paper
e-mail the Author
POETRY / Canadian
November 2006
64 pages
ISBN 0-88984-281-7
EAN 978-0-88984-281-6
$16.95
The Book of Were
Wayne Clifford
The nature of the Deity, illuminated first through a prism of found nineteenth-century steel engravings, is subsequently reconsidered by the lost Canadian poet of the 1960s. The medieval church fixed man on a balance beam between angel and animal. WereBook proposes that at present our scale makes us the center, and the animal shifts between adoration and veneration at one end, and contempt to extinction at the other. Publisher Tim Inkster proposed to poet Wayne Clifford a bestiary based on old engravings, and the poet responded with verses that seem perhaps at first simplistic, but ask the reader to question deeper the relationships between creatures and humankind. So. A Were-Book tells us about were-animals or were-folk, changlings at the edges of those stable and self-congratulatory worlds connected directly to Platonic forms. The fox in Japan is a powerful, unfriendly figure, but follows a version of human culture, in some tales playing music on local instruments. The Medusa in Greek gossip had immortal sisters, but a human enough face. An African frog becomes a model for our mutation experiments. O, Moreau, we hardly knew! A state of Were is where the worlds seethe still truly wild, the garden in which the ancestors stroll with the conversant god, and good and evil are being decided in the manner of a family living out its most ordinary conflicts. God? Hmmmm ... God's a quaint sound old relatives make, home, when those necessary times off take you back to greet them. They're so sentimental. You know you're alone in the city with only your most trusted-in-this-moment significant other(s). Then what was that animal flattened pulpy in the front gutter last week? Should you have called someone? A businesslike voice at the other end; a promise the mess would disappear? Pick up. It's some guy who's been wondering just such things. Those critters preferring the twilights of day and the stars' lit night learn the city, too. Lamps dim down residential streets where they still live among us, fitting in, invisible as the stars have become, and more artless than us, since they know what they like. Their back homes are harder to get to. But if you'll follow the crumbs ... Second Prize (Tie, Poetry). The Alcuin Society 2006 Awards for Excellence in Book Design in Canada.
The Porcupine's Quill published On Abducting the 'Cello in 2004.
Wayne Clifford lives in Halifax where in the benign seclusion of obscurity he continues to work on a massive collection now comprising some 350 sonnets.