Bytown Bookshop

Poetry Galore!!

By Richard on December 2nd, 2009

There seemed to have been a groundswell of poetry wandering into the shop over the past week.  We recieved late last week the fourth volume in the Porcupine’s Quill Essential Poets Series which provides an excellent selection of James Reaney’s work (review to come shortly).  Then the weekend saw two great poetry events take place in town, the first being a performance by poet Bill Bissett at the Mercury Lounge and the second being the Ottawa Small Press Book Fair.  Unfortunately, I missed out on both while busily working in the shop, but lived them vicariously through our regulars who attended.

Just in time for the Ottawa Small Press Fair, Apt.9 Press released two new offerings, Argossey by Ben Ladouceur and Two Boys by Michael Blouin.  We nabbed a few copies (for ourselves and the shop) and greatly enjoyed reading them over the last couple of days.  The Blouin chapbook, also Apt.9′s first foray into fiction, is exceptionally good and I looked foreward to Blouin’s upcoming second novel from which the chapbook provides us an advanced taste.

Cameron Anstee, proprietor of Apt.9 Press, also recently just had his own first book of poetry, Water Upsets Stone, released from The Emergency Response Unit Press and was kind enough to give me a copy while in the shop on Sunday. 

It is a wonderful debut book, structured around Newton’s three laws of motion, with finely crafted sequences that provide glimpses into memory, emotion and life within a few short sentences.  I’ve read it three times already and thought I’d share a little bookish excerpt from the Second Law until you get your own copy

 

I remember moving my father’s books

I remember never remove an object you find inside a book

I remember the problem becoming
how, when shelves are full, to insert new titles

& learning new ways to arrange the words
we choose to keep