Orion Sweeping

by Anne Marie Todkill

Overview

Anne Marie Todkill's debut recalibrates the anxiety of the present. It gives doubt a hearing, finding resilience in fragility and grace in unexpected places.

The poems assembled in Orion Sweeping take nothing at face value. What are we to make of a radioactive souvenir, a shape-shifting dog, landscapes made strange by time? The speakers gathered here seek to set the record straight: a mink gives advice; a wolf disputes a rumour; a photographer zooms in on a kill; a military strategist gives lessons in peace. But the sum of the evidence is not bleak. A baby arrives as robustly as a whale; the solidarity of marriage is enacted in surprising ways; father and daughter share a gift for reprieve. Under the penetrating gaze of these poems, beauty and tenderness come quietly into view.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781771315708
Publisher:	Brick Books
Publication date:	04/01/2022
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	98
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Anne Marie Todkill has lived mainly in her home town, Ottawa, but has been setting down new roots in Wollaston Township, Ontario, where she lives off-grid with her husband. She spent many years as a medical and academic editor, but never strayed far from her lifelong, intersecting preoccupations with writing and the natural world. She has won Arc Poetry Magazine's Poem of the Year contest, was a recipient of Arc’s Diana Brebner Prize, and placed first – twice – in The New Quarterly's Nick Blatchford Occasional Verse Contest. She is also a past winner of The Malahat Review’s Creative Nonfiction Prize, and her winning entry in Malahat's Novella Contest was subsequently anthologized in Best Canadian Stories. Orion Sweeping is her first book.

Table of Contents

Earth

January 1971 3

Strontium-90 4

Trinitite 5

Near Los Alamos 7

The public staircase in Toronto now named the Baldwin Steps 9

Route options 11

Trove 15

Trace 16

Teachings of the mink 17

Sighting 19

Toward a definition of wildness 20

Thirst 21

Farmyard behaviour 22

Air

Remex 25

Central Experimental Farm, April 27

Yard duty 31

Chickadee 32

November, Stormont County 33

Flight delay with telephoto 35

Flock 38

Familia

Orion sweeping 45

Clearing windthrow from the trail 47

Wash day 48

Laser correction of posterior capsular opacification subsequent to cataract implant surgery 50

Fall risk 52

Nursing home 56

Appointment at the cancer clinic 57

Social inventory, midcentury 58

Rue Sainte-Catherine, December 60

Foshan market, October 13, 2011 61

Sinus arrhythmia, pediatric 63

Afterbirth 64

Loss Lessons

Non sequitur 69

Slant 71

War stories 73

One day the trees went mystical 74

Biographical fallacy 75

Fish science 76

Remembrance Day 77

Marco Polo 79

Assisi Variations

The wolf explains 83

The father justifies himself 84

The sultan recollects 85

An embroideress reflects 90

Notes 93

Thanks 97

Editorial Reviews

"Beautiful and tender, these poems invoke a species of perception that is intimately attentive to wildness, nature, aging and loss. Todkill's language always leaves room for the reader, giving breadth and dignity to even its most personal moments. This is the work of a mature poet at the height of their craft." - from the jury of the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award

"This is the mature work of a powerful poet at home in her craft. What a pleasure to ride sidecar in this delicate, exquisite probing of the wilds beyond, among, within." - David Huebert, author of Peninsula Sinking and Chemical Valley

"Anne Marie Todkill's language is as natural as the movements of the hawk her narrator keenly observes eviscerating its prey. There's no fancy footwork here, only frankness, necessity, clarity, humility, and an amply rewarded devotion to craft." - Anita Lahey, author of Best Canadian Poetry series editor and author of The Last Goldfish: A True Tale of Friendship

"Orion Sweeping is a poetry of observation and conversation, a lyric for 'the reckless earth.' Poems across the collection, clustered thematically, consider the cosmic, the particular and the personal." - Michael Edwards, Arc Poetry Magazine

"Unlike books that invoke the wonder of other species, this does not do the seemingly obligatory hectoring last chapter of how we have destroyed it all. She starts with the destruction and moves into the continual genesis." - Pearl Pirie, The League of Canadian Poets

"It is clear that Anne Marie Todkill is a poet who cares deeply about all life forms and Earth; her poems make apparent the 'sacred and pragmatic' as they share 'the exhausted space of love.'" - Jami Macarty, Canthius

From the Publisher