Press Release and Book Launch of Gravity Matters, the poems of Sonja Greckol
The importance of “naming our world, in order to transform it” (Freire, 2002) is a central feature of popular education, so Frank Bidart’s response to the central poem in “Greckol’s haunting, monumental
‘Emilie Explains Newton to Voltaire.’” caught my attention. “ With eloquence and unceasing
formal invention, the horse with wings (Pegasus, or poetry) tries to save mortal life by naming what it was.” This connection is so relevant to my current line of inquiry into art and end-0f-life care. Accordingly, I have categorized this posting under both art-for-health and poetry.
- Dorothy Lander
Inanna Publications and Education Inc.
and XEXE Gallery invite you to join us at the launch of
Gravity Matters
poems by
Sonja Ruth Greckol
XEXE Gallery
624 Richmond St. West, Toronto
Thursday, April 16, 2009 – 6:00-8:00pm
Refreshments will be served.
The publisher gratefully acknowledges
the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts
Council for its publishing program.
(please see press release below)
March 27, 2009
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
In GRAVITY MATTERS, the poet, Sonja Ruth Greckol, traces an arc:
from a nineteenth-century European family that immigrated and
settled in central Alberta to a digitized wondering held together
by Skype and Google rooted in central Toronto. In this, a first
collection, Greckol turns obliquely from the matters of largely
personal lyrics to historical and international preoccupations
that, nevertheless, remain embodied—a pentimento of certainties,
sensualities and queries, empiricism and theory in science, moving
from daughter to mother and then mother/daughtering once again—in a
feminist voice that is urgent, empathic and wry.
Greckol’s poems track oft-opposing impulses for both ‘gravity and
flight,’ as she imagines what it is to stand at both sides of the
barricades inside our own consciousness, calibrating the complex
weave of reason and rapture. A gorgeous, intelligent churner of a
debut.
—Margaret Christakos
History and personal history, defiant elegy and hymns to the warmly
embodied self, Gravity Matters manages to find the charged moment,
goes to work there, ‘offer[ing] whiskey with poppy seed cake’. We
feel this gravitational pull, as readers; an altering, cumulative
wind unveiling the sly half-truth in, ‘zephyr shivers/the copse/on
the landfill,/and no/thing changes,/apparently’. These poems are
honest, unafraid of the mistakes in a life, the missteps of memory.
—Ken Babstock
These are poems about survival—which is to say, poems about grief
and how the soul survives it. ‘When he is dog meat, she weeps // at
the cruelty of farming: the horse without / wings cannot be saved
by naming.’ All the themes of this book are triumphantly summed up
and extended in its central poem, Greckol’s haunting, monumental
‘Emilie Explains Newton to Voltaire.’ With eloquence and unceasing
formal invention, the horse with wings (Pegasus, or poetry) tries
to save mortal life by naming what it was.
—Frank Bidart
Gravity Matters will be launched in Toronto on April 16, 2009 at
XEXE Gallery, 624 Richmond Street West, Toronto, from 6:00 to 8:00pm.
Sonja Greckol’s work has appeared in Literary Review of Canada,
Canadian Literature, Dalhousie Review, CV2, Canadian Woman Studies,
Fiddlehead and Matrix. She coordinates poetry for Women and
Environments International Magazine. She has taught college and
university, studied order and disorder in jokes, done human rights
and gender-based research and consulting, and continues to do local
activism while she writes.
For review copies, author interviews, publisher interviews, or more
information, please contact Inanna Publications at 416 736 5356 or
email luciana@yorku.ca.
