Dark Woods

by Richard Sanger

Overview

A NEW YORK TIMES BEST POETRY BOOK OF 2018

Snow, canoes, frozen ponds, lonely conifers . . . Dark Woods takes the motifs and landscape of a Canadian childhood and examines their place in a world of smartphones and overflowing inboxes. The result, Sanger’s first book in 16 years, is a striking new collection full of mysteries and reassessments, wordplay, slang, and sonnets, meditations on parenthood and the “cracks in the granite”: those urges that won’t go away, and the people who have.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781771962322
Publisher:	Biblioasis
Publication date:	06/12/2018
Pages:	72
Product dimensions:	5.25(w) x 8.25(h) x (d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Richard Sanger

 

(1960–2022) grew up in Ottawa and lived in Toronto. He published three poetry collections and a chapbook, 

Fathers at Hockey

 (2020); 

Dark Woods

, was named one of the top ten poetry books of 2018 by the 

New York Times

. His plays included

 Not Spain

, 

Two Words for Snow

, 

Hannah’s Turn

, and 

Dive 

as well as translations of Calderon, Lorca, and Lope de Vega. He also published essays, reviews, and poetry translations.

Table of Contents

Outside In 11

Artichoke 12

Babble 13

Dark Woods 14

The Family Racket 17

The Way It Worked 18

Blind Tom 19

Some Blessed Hope 21

Rain 22

Europe by the Back Door 25

Thrown 27

Merrily Down the Stream 28

Skating with Jane 29

Herons on the Ice 31

White Pine 1-5 32

Stop. Start Again 37

Different Pears 39

Party Season 40

End of winter 41

Markham Street 42

The Inbox 1-8 43

In Tadoussac 51

Not Unmarried 53

Not Drunk 54

Adulterous Mannequins 55

Cracks in the Granite 1-3 56

Long Time No See 59

Little Louis and the Big Sea 60

The Family Car 61

Tamarack 63

Camping 65

Driving West 66

Funeral Home 68

Deft Twist 69

Cornstalks 70

Joni and the Job Done 72

Last Paddle 74

Don't Ask 76

Editorial Reviews

Praise for Dark Woods

“The rueful, lucid, deliberately casual poems in “Dark Woods” can surprise you with their tenderness, but also with their prickly intelligence.” —The New York Times

“In the poems' accentual, lightly metered stanzas we are made conscious of time passing, the body aging, and those quiet moments outside time...understated and moving.” —The Malahat Review

"[Sanger's] poems are tender and often funny. Sometimes arch, sometimes bemused, he is a humane observer of daily life....Throughout Dark Woods, his cleverness and verbal mischief enliven traditional forms." —Canadian Literature

Praise for Richard Sanger

“Splendidly-shaped and imagistically adroit. These are outstanding poems.”—The Globe and Mail

“[Sanger] naturalizes the traditional influences in his poems so thoroughly they are almost covert. This gives his poems an inner voice running under the colloquial surface and suggests an attitude toward consciousness in a lyric poem as interesting as the dislocated subject…” —Books-in-Canada

“Spectacular… Sophisticated metrical sense, teasing wit and limitless linguistic resources… The real thing: an original poet of rare talent.” —The Montreal Gazette

“Very accomplished… [Sanger] writes in a voice that is all his own, and its groundtone is a cleverly, progressively sophisticated one which is never merely adroit.” —Journal of Canadian Poetry

From the Publisher