Fierce Departures

Dionne Brand is internationally known for her poetry, fiction, and essays. She has received many awards, notably the Governor General's Award for Poetry, the Trillium Award (Land to Light On), 1997), the Pat Lowther Award (thirsty, 2005), the City of Toronto Book Award (What We All Long For, 2006), and the Harbourfront Festival Award (2006), given in recognition of her substantial contribution to literature. She is a professor in the School of English and Theatre Studies at the University of Guelph.Leslie C. Sanders is a professor at York University, where she teaches African American and Black Canadian literature. She is the author of The Development of Black Theatre in America, the editor of two volumes of Langston Hughes's performance works, and a general editor of the Collected Works of Langston Hughes. She has written essays on African American and Black Canadian literature.

"As American poet Anne Waldman usefully asks, 'And what to make of [poetry]? "Do" with it? "Do" anything? Is it part of the poet's vow to perpetually catch, distill, refine, re-imagine where one walks, what one notices?' I can't answer for all poets here. As a teacher, however, I can say that yes, it is our vow as instructors to show students how poetry perpetually catches, distills, refines, and re-imagines our selves and our worlds. I agree with Neil Besner, general editor of Wilfrid Laurier Press, that what we 'do' with poetry starts with our students. We need to attend more carefully to what poetry we teach as well as how we teach it. I thus applaud the efforts of the Laurier Poetry Series, which, with the hopes of creating and sustaining 'the larger readership that contemporary Canadian poetry so richly deserves,' has been publishing 'useful, engaging, and comprehensive introductions' to the life's work of major Canadian poets. Each of these volumes includes 35 poems selected and introduced by a critic, followed by an afterword by the poet. The volumes are intended, Besner argues, to make the connections between the life and the work more accessible to a 'general' reader ('Foreword'). ``Besner's eloquent, timely, and practical arguments remind me of Lyn Hejinian's belief that our poetic revolutions will always be 'local, particular, and temporary,' but are nonetheless undiminished. Let us consider what poetry is doing in the world. Let us consider how Laurier's texts differ, as Besner argues in their intent, from the conventional anthology and whether they in fact demonstrate the relevance of poetry to a life. Let us consider, for example, how in the Laurier Poetry Series' most recent collections, Mobility of Light: The Poetry of Nicole Brossard and Fierce Departures: The Poetry of Dionne Brand, we might understand what it means to live. Let us think about how, through poetry, we can re-imagine who we are as well as the world we walk through." -- Emily Carr -- ARC Poetry Magazine, Winter 2010, 201001

• Fierce Departures: The Poetry of Dionne Brand, selected with an introduction by Leslie C. SandersForeword Neil BesnerBiographical NoteIntroduction Leslie C. SandersNo Language Is NeutralNo language is neutralThere it was anyway, some damn memory half-eatenPilate was that river I never crossed as a childI walk Bathurst Street until it come like homeBut wait, this must come out thenIn another place, not here, a woman might touchLand to Light OnVVVivVVthirstyIIIXIIXIIIXVXVIIXVIIIXXXInventory IIIOne year she sat at the television weepingnothing personal is recorded herewhat confidences would she tell you thenshe's heard clearly now, twenty-threebeating on the tympanic bone, by suicide bombAt least someone should stay awake, she thinksand bones beatific, sharpened with heat, at least""It is worst during the nightthere's another life, she listens, each hour, each nightIf they're numb over there, and all around hershe'll gather the passions of womentill then / where are the packages of black peppershe is a woman who is losing the ideaAfterword Dionne BrandAcknowledgements