Ariadne’s Notes! The World Poetry Café Radio show on Thursday, September 17, 2016 was honored to have the exceptional Maureen Scott phone in to promote her upcoming book launch at the Italian Cultural Center in Vancouver, BC March 30. A fascinating show with hosts Ariadne Sawyer and Neall Ryon and sound engineer Victor Schwartzman included a poem by an ancient Irish poet and the fluid enchanting poems of Maureen Scott Harris.
We want to also thank our wonderful long term partners the Association of Italian Canadian Writers.
CLICK HERE FOR THE RADIO SHOW on now!
Sussurri dall’Acqua A Bilingual Poetry Reading
March 30, 2016 6:30 pm – 10:30 pm.
The launch of the Italian translation of Maureen Scott Harris’s Drawing Lessons, winner of the Trillium Book Award for Poetry. Poet Maureen Scott Harris and translator Alessandra Bordini will read selected poems in Italian and English. Light refreshments will follow. In collaboration with the Association of Italian Canadian Writers. At 6:30pm in the Museum. Free admission.
Location Venue: Il Museo
Museum Venue: IL CENTRO Italian Cultural Centre,
3075 Slocan Street, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
Phone: 604 430 3337
MAUREEN SCOTT HARRIS
Poet and essayist Maureen Scott Harris was born in Prince Rupert, grew up in Winnipeg, and lives in Toronto. She has published two collections of poems: A Possible Landscape (Brick Books, 1993) and Drowning Lessons (Pedlar Press, 2004), which was awarded the 2005 Trillium Prize for Poetry. She has twice won second prize in CV2’s poetry contests. Pedlar Press published her third collection, Slow Curve Out, in fall 2012. Sussuri dall’acqua. Poesie scelte (Giuliano Ladolfi Editore, 2016)Bilingual edition with Italian and English on facing pages and an interview with the author in the afterword.
The Italian edition can be purchased on Amazon (https://www.amazon.ca/Sussurri-dallacqua-Scott-Harris-Maureen/dp/886644166X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1458248241&sr=8-1&keywords=sussurri+dall%27acqua
and on the publisher’s website (http://www.ladolfieditore.it/index.php/it/zaffiro/sussurri-dall-acqua.html).
This collection of verse by the Canadian writer Maureen Scott Harris, which won her the prestigious Trillium Book Award for Poetry in Canada, is the first publication of her work in Italian. The texts presented here, with Italian translation on the facing pages, are a selection of the best poems from the writer’s second volume, Drowning Lessons. The Italian rendering of the title evokes two of the threads from which the volume is woven: in the onomatopeic Sussuri (whispers), the echo of the vibrations of the cosmos sounds as “whispered music” to the poet’s ear; while the direct reference to water (acqua) acknowledges that inexhaustible source of life and fatal threat of annihilation. The aquatic imagery permeating these verses goes beyond the ancient, symbolic duality of life and death, to become metaphor for a hidden space of individual memory with its flow of blurred sensations and erased recollections where all perception of limits is lost and conscious thought drowns. This necessary sinking enables the poet to surface again with a new awareness of both self and surroundings.
In the fluid universe of this book the familiar face of the domestic world coexists with the inscrutability of Nature and her “endless delicate repetition.” The borders between ‘inside’ and ‘outside,’ ‘near’ and ‘far,’ ‘here’ and ‘there’ often blur, disappear, and then open into “some other dimension,” a universal pause where everything “thins and questions.” From this threshold between sound and silence, light and darkness, the visible and invisible, we step into liminal territory where the poetic word, instrument of both self-knowledge and awareness of the human place in the cosmos, reveals its hidden fragility: its inability to express what cannot be articulated. Yet the figures inhabiting this undefined space offer the astonishing clarity of vivid dreams and the penetrating intensity of the present moment. A force reverberates in the rhythm of the poetic discourse, rich in assonance, alliteration and onomatopoeia, mapping a geography of the soul certain to stir every reader.
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