"Repose" is an exploration of the definition of cultural freedom; it is a pointed look at an obsession with production, and a comparison of natural and urban environments that shape our lives. Getty argues that our lives are so tightly controlled by non-negotiable experiences of employment that for the majority of people employment is anything but a democratic process. Getty's attempt to find spontaneity and a modern idiom by writing in traditional poetic styles mirrors a cultural attempt to find freedom and vitality. By meticulously studying the poetic techniques of the past, Adam Getty has put new wine into old wineskins: he has found a voice that is erudite, disciplined and, ultimately, free.
"Repose" is an exploration of the definition of cultural freedom; it is a pointed look at an obsession with production, and a comparison of natural and urban environments that shape our lives. Getty argues that our lives are so tightly controlled by non-negotiable experiences of employment that for the majority of people employment is anything but a democratic process. Getty's attempt to find spontaneity and a modern idiom by writing in traditional poetic styles mirrors a cultural attempt to find freedom and vitality. By meticulously studying the poetic techniques of the past, Adam Getty has put new wine into old wineskins: he has found a voice that is erudite, disciplined and, ultimately, free.
Adam Getty was born in Toronto and currently lives in Hamilton, Ontario. He has had his poetry published in journals in both the USA and Canada.
And Adam Getty's excellent book Repose, while similarly capturing
elements of human construction and the hard work of physical
labour, questions such sentiments. While there is a poetics to
labour in these poems, there is also a great deal of agitation
against mismanagement, against exploitation gone rife. The title
poem reveals a speaker who is:
a red-breasted robin that's never/ left the latticework of limbs
and leaves/ for the deepening sky and now is severed/ by consuming
fire and a thick corrupting sleeve/ of bitter smoke, smoked out as
though a beetle/ had emerged from dark wood thrown on a rising
fire.
Getty's well-composed book examines the conditions of labour, of
the human interaction with the world, and finds in them a world
that is poetic, yet sorely lacking the self-awareness that would
give it a strong sense of equity, of ecology, and of justice.
―The Dalhousie Review
[a] brilliant mixture of technical control and social protest
―Maurice Mireau, Winnipeg Free Press
Getty has created a collection of highly intelligent, deeply felt,
and ... beautifully written poems.
--Adrian Fowler, Journal of Canadian Poetry
[Getty's poems] juxtapose the mythic and quotidian so as to forge a
practical spirituality that bears witness equally to the prophet
and the prostitute.
-Emily Carr, Canadian Literature
Getty's poems are as deeply lodged in his literary and scholarly
syllabus as they are entrenched in the industrial stench of
Hamilton, with its wreckages, steel mills and slaughterhouses ...
[his] deployment of traditional forms, prophetic rhetoric and
classical allusions would appear to go hand in hand with his
resistance to the desecrations of modernity, his desire to return
to, or at least to retain the illusion of, a more gracious era.
―Catherine Owen, Canadian Notes & Queries
|
Ask a Question About this Product More... |
|
