Alice Major - Böcker

In ancient Roman times rituals were performed to sanctify the ground on which new cities were founded. With this invocation, space could then be occupied. In her brilliant new collection, Alice Major's poems concern themselves with human occupation: how we occupy cities; how we occupy ourselves as citizens, workers and thinkers; how we occupy mythologies and metaphors; and how we occupy the passage of our lives. Written largely in a public voice, these poems invoke human preoccupations that resonate through landscapes of time and space.

This is a daughter's poetic homage to her parents, both elegy and celebration, that explores the transformations wrought by history, biology, and the alchemy of love. In Greek myth, the daughters of Memory were the Muses. Alice Major listens carefully to their voices. ".tender, wise, beautifully cadenced work which embraces the reader on every page." - Don Domanski

Poet Alice Major was given a book on relativity at the impressionable age of ten, so she never quite understood why science came to be dismissed as reductive or opposite to art. She surveys the sciences of the past half-century -- from physical to cognitive to evolutionary -- to shed light on why and how human beings create poems, challenging some of the mantras of postmodern thought in the process. Part memoir, part ars poetica, part wonder-journey, Intersecting Sets is a wide-ranging and insightful amalgam.

Like the ever-widening universe, Standard candles expands on Alice Major’s earlier themes of family, mythology, and cosmology, teasing out subtle wonders in form and subject. Her voice resonates through experiments with old and new poetic forms as she imbues observed and imagined phenomena—from the centres of galaxies to the mysteries of her own backyard—with the most grounded and grounding moments of human experience. In Standard candles, readers will find an emotional dimension that seamlessly intersects with the dimensions of space and time. Fans of Alice Major will enjoy seeing her work through familiar themes, while readers new to her poetry will discover unexplored universes.Alice Major emigrated from Scotland at the age of eight, and grew up in Toronto before coming west to work as a weekly newspaper reporter. She served as Edmonton’s first poet laureate and has been inducted into the city’s cultural hall of fame. A widely-published author, she has won many distinctions. Her most recent book is Intersecting Sets: A Poet Looks at Science, which received the Wilfrid Eggleston Award for Nonfiction as well as a National Magazine Award gold medal. Her website is www.alicemajor.com.Let us compare cosmologiesThere is a beginning and a middle.There is an arc of narrative.There is a word, a large engraved initial.There is imperative—a cause, a god. Or not.There is an end. A purpose.Or maybe none. There is a plotwith reasons, reason. There is a circus,a theatre stage of space and time.There are equations at the bottomor the top. There is a pantheonof matter, motion, scattered photons.And the questions every universe expects:what came before? What happens next?

Alice Major observes the comedy and the tragedy of this human-dominated moment on Earth. Major’s most persistent question—“Where do we fit in the universe?”—is made more urgent by the ecological calamity of human-driven climate change. Her poetry leads us to question human hierarchies, loyalties, and consciousness, and challenges us to find some humility in our overblown sense of our cosmic significance.Now, welcome to the Anthropoceneyou battered, tilting globe. Still you gleam,a blue pearl on the necklace of the planets.This home. Clouds, oceans, life forms span itfrom pole to pole, within a peel of airas thin as lace lapped round an apple. Fairand fragile bounded sphere, yet strangely tough—this world that life could never love enough.And yet its loving-care has been entrustedto a feckless species, more investedin the partial, while the total goes unnoticed.— from “Welcome to the Anthropocene”