With its juxtaposition of Canadian prairie with the downs of southern England, with its movement between reality and dream, night and day, Norm Sacuta's brilliant debut poetry collection, Garments of the Known, uses both traditional verse forms and linguistic fracture to create a most passionate landscape.
That landscape is always half one world, half another. As a gay man in Alberta, Sacuta's verse lends a wary eye to the political and the dangerous, even as it articulately pokes fun at the whole notion of a gay identity and the imagery needed to express it. He has also lived and studied in England, and that experience mirrors the struggle between tradition and experimentation in his verse, and a voice caught between a sense of familial belonging and cultural expatriation.
Garments of the Known marks the arrival of a powerful, original new voice in Canadian poetry, a voice that will continue to be heard from in years to come.
With its juxtaposition of Canadian prairie with the downs of southern England, with its movement between reality and dream, night and day, Norm Sacuta's brilliant debut poetry collection, Garments of the Known, uses both traditional verse forms and linguistic fracture to create a most passionate landscape.
That landscape is always half one world, half another. As a gay man in Alberta, Sacuta's verse lends a wary eye to the political and the dangerous, even as it articulately pokes fun at the whole notion of a gay identity and the imagery needed to express it. He has also lived and studied in England, and that experience mirrors the struggle between tradition and experimentation in his verse, and a voice caught between a sense of familial belonging and cultural expatriation.
Garments of the Known marks the arrival of a powerful, original new voice in Canadian poetry, a voice that will continue to be heard from in years to come.
I. The South Downs Way
The Hills Are a Lie
Sappho, at Fifteen
Old Story
Tower Rook
Nothing to Write Home About
November 22, 1963
What I Wanted to Say
Lacuna
For Frederick Fleet
sing-rail trilogy
II. Inland
Sonnets for the Policeman in an Edmonton Sun Photograph
Death of a Scuba Diver at West Edmonton Mall
Another Letter to the Dead
Morning after the Rodeo
gay in stock's time
Alberta Pick-Ups
Summer Windigo
III. Night Watch
What of the Night?
The Lengths He'll Go
Sleeping with Michael
For Michael, in Part
In the Lottery Corp
How to Talk to a Brushcut Man
Down on Vegas
For Robert -- Now in College, and Finally on Stage
A Fairy's Rings
A Brief History of a Fundamentalist
as for that cap in your back pocket
Last night on CBC
Hallway Light
IV. Love of the Same
Love of the Same
Exposure (Hail Storm, July 25/77)
Soft Shoe
My Brother's War Models
My Mother's War Story
Radio Free
A Poet Recalls Fiction
Norm Sacuta was raised in Edmonton, and has returned to live in the city twice, after attending the University of British Columbia in 1987 and after studying in England for three years in the 1990s. It was in England that he was exposed to the politically charged atmosphere of the Sexual Dissidence and Cultural Change Program at the University of Sussex, and it was here that much of the poetry in this collection was formed or re-worked. He works as a writer and editor in Edmonton, where he is currently completing his first novel, One Last Thing About the Titanic.
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