Flowers of Flame: The Unheard Voices of Iraq

Interesting review of Flowers of Flame: The Unheard Voices of Iraq, edited by Dan Veach and reviewed by John Bradley.

NPR update: interview, reviews, and editorial changes

NPR is updated with reviews of poetry books by Mike Freeman, JP King and Douglas Burnet Smith, as well as a new interview with Roger Bell courtesy of Jacob Bachinger.

Dani Couture will be dedicating more time to her various projects, including a forthcoming book of poems, and she is at work on a novel as well. She's a very talented and dedicated writer, and I'm sure these books will be as deeply worthy as Good Meat. Many thanks to Dani for the thoughtful interviews, poems arranged for NPR, and articles. I don't even really know I'd have started the site without a friend to help, and it has been a better one all along as a result of her contributions.

As far as a new NPR editor, I think it makes sense to now look for some help outside Toronto, and preferably even outside Ontario, so the site becomes more of a truly national one. Anyone interested to chat about it should visit the About page of the site for a contact email, and drop me a line.

NPR update: Jeramy Dodds interview

Visit our main page for a new interview with Jeramy Dodds.

There's a fairly brief but interesting article on Ted Hughes -- poet and eco warrior, over at Guardian Books, which has an impressive amount of material on poetry. I've always felt that poets should at least be marginally politically active, as a way to help create the kind of world that will read our books -- a literate and compassionate one (not to mention a world that isn't too busy with ecological disasters to read poetry).

On that note, the video Greenpeace: Inspiring Action can be found here, and it's possible to become a member on the Greenpeace site -- you can sign up to donate any amount automatically every month and help the organization grow in numbers.

Other sites I've been visiting lately include The Afterword, maintained by the National Post and featuring frequent interviews with poets and fiction writers. Quillblog is also worth a daily trip (I say that as though it involves exercise), for mixing news with a certain amount of irreverence.

And though it has nothing to do with poetry, there's a really interesting review over at The Brooklyn Rail of Gods and Soldiers: The Penguin Anthology of Contemporary African Writing, edited by Rob Spillman, as well as a compelling argument that this is very important writing.

Picking 10

Interesting article in the New York Times about the fairly immense responsibility of picking out the ten letters a day Obama will read.

And though this is old news by now, the Griffin Poetry Prize has made an announcement about all their contenders.

Seen Reading: 30 in 30, and more

Over at Seen Reading, Julie Wilson celebrates National Poetry Month with an impressive project. It's a pile of excellent poets -- in fact, thirty poets for the thirty days of April, each reading one of their own and a cover poem as well.

Meanwhile, The League of Canadian Poets reserves the first day of April to announce the nominations for the Pat Lowther Memorial Award and Gerald Lampert Memorial Award.

Readings at Harbourfront Centre deserves credit for bringing attention to the younger generation of poets with an event there, and extending IFOA readings to Jacob McArthur Mooney, Dani Couture, Jason Guriel, Jennica Harper, and Meaghan Strimas.

Speaking of young talented poets, I recently saw Jim Johnstone at the Pivot Reading Series. Johnstone kicks off poetry month on his own blog by posting a poem by Blair Trewartha, from his own Misunderstandings Magazine.

I find book trailers to be a curious new trend, and here's an interesting one -- Coach House has produced one to celebrate the launch of the Matthew Tierney book, The Hayflick Limit.

NPR update: new interview, reviews and article

NPR is updated with reviews of The Bentleys and Types of Canadian Women, an article by Christopher MacKinnon, reviews of two Don Domanski titles, and an interview with Elise Partridge by Dani Couture.

Stepping Stones: interviews with Seamus Heaney

Adam Kirsch has an interesting piece on the new book Stepping Stones: interviews with Seamus Heaney, but Dennis O'driscoll:

"O'Driscoll asks Heaney about one such line, "Where kesh and loaning finger out to heather": "Did you expect non-Ulster readers to engage in some research or was it your hope that context and cadence would provide sufficient illumination of the meaning?" To which Heaney gives a refreshingly insouciant answer: "I didn't think at all of the reader's problem when I wrote the line. The joy was in solving my own writer's need."

Read the rest of the article here.