Most Charming Creatures: Poems

(Paperback)

Publishing Details

Classifications

Physical Properties

Description

With uncanny wit, inventive beauty, and numinous surprise, The Most Charming Creatures explores the contemporary and its language, considering our wonder, sorrow, bewilderment, anxiety, and tenderness. While these poems energise and connect and 'turn the paren- / theses inside out so that / we mean everything,' they are also alive to the alluring complicity of language and its duplicity and deceptions. 'This is the way the world ends / Not with a bang but / while we watch.'

A follow-up to the award-winning authors acclaimed selected poems, this new collection continues Barwins examination of the possibilities of the poem: a celebration, a story, an investigation, a riff, a word machine, a parable, a transformation. But what are the 'most charming creatures' of the title In 1862, scientific illustrator Ernst Haeckel termed radiolarians (ancient single-celled organisms with mineral skeletons) 'the most charming creatures,' but here Barwin turns the microscope around to consider something just as strange and mysterious: language, our culture, and the self. From microorganisms, onion rings, grief, and Gerard Manley Hopkins to beetles, neoliberalism, sandwiches, Martin Luther, and stand-up comedy, he offers: 'its a miracle that weve survived / its a miracle that weve survived at all.'

Reviews

"[Gary Barwin's] latest delightful effusion of verse The Most Charming Creatures only adds to the accomplishment of his selected, For It Is a Pleasure and a Surprise to Breathe from 2019." -- WordCityLit blog

Author Bio

The bestselling author of 26 books of fiction and poetry, Gary Barwin has won the Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for Humour, the Canadian Jewish Literary Award, and has been a finalist for the Governor General's Award and the Scotiabank Giller Prize. He lives in Hamilton, ON.