Stephen Collis | Issue 35
Poetry | not a dove / but a singing mechanical bird / perched on a tank’s gun
The Country of Poets
The country of poets is being bombed again I can see the clouds of word-dust billowing into the televised air cries come out of burnt nights metered but tending towards a fractured syntax and the unexpected image not a dove but a singing mechanical bird perched on a tank’s gun its new rhythms the staccato of RPGs the phosphorous of idiot wind
Stephen Collis is the author of over a dozen books of poetry and prose, including The Commons (2008), the BC Book Prize winning On the Material (2010), and Almost Islands: Phyllis Webb and the Pursuit of the Unwritten (2018)—all published by Talonbooks. A History of the Theories of Rain (2021) was a finalist for the Governor General’s Award for poetry, and in 2019, Collis was the recipient of the Writers’ Trust of Canada Latner Poetry Prize. The Middle, the second volume of a trilogy begun with A History of the Theories of Rain, will be published in 2024. He lives near Vancouver, on unceded Coast Salish Territory, and teaches poetry and poetics at Simon Fraser University.
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