Description:
A paean to iconic personalities
Moving, intriguing, and exquisite, this collection is a paean to the iconic personalities Marty Gervais has met and written about during his career as both a poet and a journalist and includes poems about such diverse characters as Muhammad Ali, Mother Teresa, Benjamin Spock, Norman Mailer, Karen Kain and Thomas Merton. Each poem narrows the focus to one little detail about them, a slice of a memoir but in poetic form.
Brief description:
Marty Gervais is a Canadian poet, photographer, journalist, and teacher. Winner of the prestigious Toronto's Harbourfront Festival Prize for his contributions to Canadian letters and to emerging writers, and also winner of the Milton Acorn People's Poetry Award, the Queen's Jubilee Medal and the recipient of 16 Western Ontario Newspaper Awards for journalism. In 2006 Gervais and his work were the subject of a TV Bravo episode of the television series Heart of a Poet produced by Canadian filmmaker Maureen Judge.
Review Quotes:
"Gervais captures and refreshes the quotidian and domestic beauty of being alive in a place called home, living in a house in a hometown and being a storyteller. A William Faulkner of Windsor. A Shelby Foote of the border city. And of course, he's much more than that...He reminds us of how quirky perspectives of a brilliant mind can show us what we would otherwise see... "--John B. Lee, Award-winning Canadian poet and Poet Laureate of Brantford and Poet Laureate of the Canada Cuba Literary Alliance
"In his remarkable poems, Marty Gervais celebrates life with journalistic accuracy, lively unusual imagery, and subtle shifts in tone expressing the world in a larger sense of time and place. In the anniversary poem "Nov. 7, 2018," he writes "we are here /a half century of remembering / trusting the unknown and knowing everything." This is a rich wide-ranging collection, displaying the abundance of Marty Gervais' talent." --Laurence Hutchman, Canadian poet
"Marty Gervais is one of the finest poetic voices in Canada. His powerful and clear reportage, his keen eye for the unusual in the everyday, and his delight in our humanity affirm Gervais as an essential chronicler of our beautiful souls."--Bruce Meyer, Award-winning Canadian writer
"The best of Mary Gervais' work creates an engaging tension between the ordinary surfaces of life and the underlying pathos." --The Globe and Mail
"Marty Gervais poetry has always been authentic and deeply human, and these new poems are his most powerful and moving to date. He has always been able to embody a variety of voices in his work and bring each alive through an abundance of detail. He does that again in these poems and as you read you may even encounter yourself and those you love. Whatever he writes is rendered truthfully and he never pulls away from the harsh lessons. His new poems will draw you in and once engaged you will be rewarded by irresistible insights. They are robust and unapologetically honest poems and reveal many certain, unavoidable truths."--Robert Hilles, Governor General's Award winning poet and novelist