Book Information
- Publisher
- McClelland & Stewart
- Published
- 2010-03-30
- Pages
- 128 pages
- Language
- 英語
- Size
- 13.51 x 0.76 x 20.55 cm
- ISBN-13
- 9780771017346
- ISBN-10
- 0771017340
- Price
- 2881 JPY
- Category
- 洋書/Literature & Fiction/Mythology & Folk Tales/Fairy Tales
Dionne Brand’s hypnotic, urgent long poem is about the bones of fading cultures and ideas, about the living museums of spectacle where these bones are found. At the centre of Ossuaries is the narrative of Yasmine, a woman living an underground life, fleeing from past actions and regrets, in a perpetual state of movement. She leads a solitary clandestine life, crossing borders actual (Algiers, Cuba, Canada), and timeless. Cold-eyed and cynical, she contemplates the periodic crises of the contemporary world. This is a work of deep engagement, sensuality, and ultimate craft from an essential observer of our time and one of the most accomplished poets writing today.
DIONNE BRAND's literary credentials are legion. Her novel Theory was a Globe and Mail Best Book. Her poetry collection The Blue Clerk was shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize and won the Trillium Book Prize. Her collection Ossuaries won the Griffin Poetry Prize, and other collections have won the Governor General's Literary Award, the Trillium Book Prize, and the Pat Lowther Memorial Award. Among her other novels, In Another Place, Not Here was selected as a NYT Book Review Notable Book and a Best Book by the Globe and Mail ; At the Full and Change of the Moon was selected as a Best Book by the LA Times ; and What We All Long For won the Toronto Book Award. In 2006, Brand was awarded the Harbourfront Festival Prize for her contribution to the world of books and writing; from 2009 to 2012 she served as Toronto's Poet Laureate, and in 2020 she won the internationally prestigious Windham-Campbell Prize for Fiction. In 2017, she was named to the Order of Canada. And in 2022, she became Editorial Director of Alchemy, a line of books within Knopf Canada. She lives in Toronto.
Reviews
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Ossuaries is not the type of book that you pick up and read for fun (in the fun category this book's rating would be more like a one star). It's the type of book that you read over and over again, looking at the fine print, hoping that you pick up something that you didn't get the last time around, because otherwise it makes no sense. But once the pieces all fall into place, Ossuaries creates a new world of understanding for this "urgent long poem". The poem exists beyond the words on the paper. There is an entire Ossuary XI dedicated to Jacob Lawrence's War series. This adds so much to the work because it is a visual representation of the ideas that Brand is presenting. This poem is a contemplation on the horrible living conditions that the underprivileged face, not just because of their physical poverty, but also because of society's judgment upon them, the "violence of glances". Lawrence's paintings are a contemplation on a portion of the underprivileged, the black men in WWII. There is also a selection of jazz music floating through the poem. They remind me of how poetry can be rhythmic, if not also lyrical, especially in stanzas where Brand repeats a certain word, or a certain category of words. The repetition adds a beat to the words. The four-star rating on this review is assigned a "I like it" meaning by Amazon, but I don't think that is a good reflection of how I feel about the book. It's not that I like the book, so much as that I respect it. I think it is good poetry, not in the classical sense of its rhetorical devices, but in the amount of research put into it and the voice that it gives to the alienated. ~Candice
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Black elixir.