Kathleen McCracken


Books



Copies available for purchase via No Alibis Bookstore 
83 Botanic Avenue
Belfast BT7 1JL
028-90-319601
http://noalibis.com
Email David Torrans david@noalibis.com       
or Kathleen McCracken at otterkid@gmail.com



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Double Self Portrait with Mirror:
New & Selected Poems
1978-2014

 


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Bilingual English-Brazilian Portuguese Edition
With a Preface by Medbh McGuckian


Double Self Portrait with Mirror: New & Selected Poems (1978-2014) is a milestone publication from Canadian poet Kathleen McCracken. Published by Brazil’s innovative Editora Ex Machina press, this bilingual edition brings together a group of startlingly original new poems with selections from her seven previously published collections. 

Translated by José Roberto O’Shea, organized by Beatriz Kopschitz Bastos and including a preface written by Medbh McGuckian, this initial volume in Ex Machina’s series of English-Brazilian Portuguese poetry books introduces McCracken’s work to Brazilian readers for the first time. For those familiar with her poetry, it offers a compilation that is testimony to the consistency and the diversity of her vision. As McGuckian writes in her preface, ‘Double Self Portrait with Mirror showcases the artist in her fruitful prime. A bilingual edition of integrity and elegance, it will encourage a wider appreciation of her ongoing work as a Canadian poet of international repute, at the same moment as it marks the emergence of an important new voice in Brazil’s vibrant catalogue of contemporary literature in translation.'

O’Shea’s translation captures with precision and creativity McCracken’s blend of the colloquial and the exotic, and renders exactly the surprising metaphorical topographies that are her trademark. Whether she is mapping the lakes, woods and rural towns of her native Ontario or sounding out the psychic geography of the American West, the poems in Double Self Portrait with Mirror flash with meanings that are fleeting yet sustaining. McCracken’s is a poetry intensely aware of the limits of the physical universe, yet which breathes an insatiable faith in the transcendental.

Editora Ex Machina is at http://editoraexmachina.com.br, and the editors can be contacted via Facebook, Twitter or at contato@editoraexmachina.com.br


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​This is a poetry of continental reach and gravity. And this volume, this extraordinary artefact, testifies to that. Kathleen's lyric facility, her discursive intelligence in phrasing which isn't wrong-footed by economy of expression, her enviable clarity of vision, her fearless, gentle, relentless courage in episodes of adversity and loss, are all entirely at home in this geography and in the commerce of influence and exchange which is how poetry works on this island of Ireland.
Damian Smyth, Launch Introduction for Double Self Portrait With Mirror
In these poems, which are marked by the amplitude of the road and the forest, there are echoes of the Zen metaphysics of Gary Snyder and the country imagery of Jim Harrison and Jim Dodge in her mustangs, truckers and the presence of indigenous North American mythology. Narrative, yet replete with characters, the strength of the poems lies in their metaphysics.
Joca Reinners Terron, Guia da Folha 


Read Qwerty Review
The Gauntlet Road
 
My father is driving north through snow
from Orangeville on to Primrose, Shelburne, Dundalk
where beyond the big bend at the cemetery
it’s a straight run all the way
the old road scored 
into the mind inside his mind
like some primal planisphere
or the photo of his daughter
stapled to the pickup’s visor
but tonight it’s falling heavy
and he’s flanked by drifts and stark
wind devils, tailed by blizzards
heading into whiteout
the weatherman reporting 
more to come, a storm front
bearing down across southwest Ontario
so he’s looking out for signs
familiar shapes to guide him
since the centre and the shoulder lines
have dissolved in roiling columns
of hypnotic superfine grainflake
and he’s thinking what would Freddy do
(Freddy who signed up and made it back
from the war without a scratch
who’s not his brother but is more
a brother than the two who were)
wondering would he pull over
but keep the engine ticking
or hold to driving, snowblind
and all the while there’s this war inside his head
in the head inside his head
over how he doesn’t know
what Freddy or the rest would do
(not his father scaling dirt tracks
in his maroon Model A
or his son whose red Camaro
kind of surfs the 401)
because they’re not here
it’s himself alone this time
dicing the ice stung blacktop
he’s driven half his life 
to that flare he’s got a bead on 
up ahead but still a ways off to the left
that might be marsh gas
foxfire, daybreak, porchlight 
or another winter barn gone up in flames
and the horses, those same ones 
the Talbot kids rode bareback
through last summer
spooked and out there too
running just like him the gauntlet road. 
Zero Midspan Bending Moment
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Imagine two pyramids, their separate peaks
supporting two horizontal lines
aslant but balanced
in dramatic counterweight.
 
Imagine a river, its white force
pressing the pyramids for explanations 
as if they were not steadfast stalwarts
enamored of the floodplain.
 
Imagine at the centre point
that fraction of a hair’s breadth
where the lines are drawn to meet but don’t
a slight, invisible hump – a hillock in a gap.
 
This is where we build our house.
Zero midspan bending moment.
As if it might yet be possible
to outsmart the laws of gravity and love
 
as if amidst the midway’s lustrous wreckage
we could stand together
tracking planes, scouting trains
on the bridge our joined hands make.

Tattoo Land, Exile Editions, 2009

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Kathleen McCracken is an important poet because she is – like David Gascoyne, Thom Gunn, Kathleen Raine and other members of the scattered visionary minority – flaringly receptive to even the slightest possibility of the miraculous. With all its intellectuality, serenity and restlessness, Tattoo Land will kindle in readers an awed appreciation of the human mystery.
​Andrew Keanie, Almatroz


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Allen Ginsberg’s Bed
 
Hottest night in the history
of New York City, sweat slick electric
body stripped, spreadeagled, solo
on Allen Ginsberg’s bed
all the stars of the known universe
cascading through the hydrogen skull.
 
Allen Ginsberg is not at home.
Allen Ginsberg is a thousand miles away
in Boulder, Colorado conversing with Chogyam Trungpa.
I am a custodian, lone Vitruvian 
man minding the premises merely.
 
Not thinking, just breathing
sucking air the way planes do
descending from unsayable altitudes
whole elaborate mechanism deliberately
getting used to surviving
 
midnight shell shock
punk up from behind back
mugging six blocks from 
these windows, that door
this home a long way from home.
 
The gun, a biretta, may or may not
have been metal, metaphysical.
Hey Allen Ginsberg I’m as unstrung as you were
mugged in that burned out basement
clutching poems, telephoning cops in the fluorescent    bodega.
 
Wake up and here is Manhattan, an uncut
day for night sequence
film of a film 
neither of us is able to edit
down to the final frame
to what it barely is.
​Burying the Raven
 
Let him come back to me whole, in dreams stain
my bleached mornings, undead familiar.
 
Let his nacre wingspan outgleam itself
in death, the swarming mites turn to snow.
 
Let his scimitar beak inscribe on my emerging
skull the poetry of the stratosphere.
 
Let his brave talons transport
my long shanks, my folded ribs, my irreducible heart
 
to the tops of cedars where under
Pacific cloud cover he places in my mouth
 
the almandine blessing stone
I have set into his.

Mooncalves, Exile Editions, 2007

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​Francis/Francine, Real Hermaphrodite
 
Tiresias drifting by on his bicycle
sliced me in two.
He grinned and mama
declared me ballast, windfall from the gods.
 
Dear girls, dear boys
who am I but everything
you are not:
the back of the mirror, 
the B side of your sweetheart's
favourite single.
 
Monsieur photographe
what are my breasts
but drumskins
stretched to bruising?
 
Senor medico
what do you make of me
- penis, vagina -
my double sex nothing
but sheer miracle?
 
For ten fresh shinplasters
apiece you can
test my indifference, prove me
unadulterated grift or
genuine gold.
 
Heart jumping to the clapped out
jazz of jalopies
I cross the bankrupt
parking lots of America
 
childless starlet
whistling Dixie as I
cast off clean dollars
- windfall from the gods -
half for the girls
half for the boys.
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​Eng Alone

They say you cried out
in the iced-up January night
 
but in point of fact
it was me.
 
Not because I couldn't catch
the intimate rasp of your stale breath
 
drowning out where my thunderous blood
drained into your stopped veins.
 
Not because you were dead beside me
and I knew it.
 
My voice
made the sound 
 
of Eng 
without Chang
 
In
without Jun
 
the green fruit surprised 
by the fall of the ripe
 
and was silenced in the vastness
of its own absence.

A Geography of Souls, Thistledown Press, 2002

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The possibility of an otherworld which we can enter or encounter, a dimension beyond or beneath everyday reality, grounds McCracken's work in this new book. She takes both worlds seriously, blending and moving between the visionary and the daily with fluidity. Her poems explore and express big ideas - that home is achieved through a combination of politics and spirit, that connections by convergence, overlay, and echo are as real as cause and effect, and that poetry can make present the invisible and absent.
Maureen Scott Harris, The Malahat Review
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A Geography of Souls
 
Your handwriting reversed
in the concave mirror
its shy surfaces
garlanded with winter
discloses a fluid calligraphy
 
            millrace, aqueduct, the tidal draw
            of underwater caves
            where swimmers go to drown
            their bodies inscribing
            the lightest stroke of all.
 
What goes unnoticed
in the writing on the wall
in every disquisition
on the species of love
or the nature of missives
 
            makes up a geography
            of souls, a code
            all colour and deepline –
            a swift swimming the windowpane or
            your handwriting, reversed.
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A Geography of Souls exhibits an uncommon fusion of poetic, colloquial, incantatory, private and public languages, achieving a resonance marking the best of what a lyric can do. Here we have evidence of that ineffable lifeblood of the lyric: music.
Susan Holbrook, Canadian Literature
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This poet listens to the sounds of the earth and its inhabitants with a sensitivity to nuance that is breath-taking.
Julia Reibentanz, University of Toronto Quarterly


​Stopping with Horses
 
Inside this green rain
he is running to the edge
of a red continent
its songlines aligning
ridgetops and riverfords.
 
He is on the switchback
when six horses stung by headlights
catch him out
their stippled hides a mapwork
his hands read with the intelligence
of the first cartographer.
 
The globe tilts on its quivering axis.
It is August on Wolf Hill.
The breathing of horses is its own continent.

     Blue Light, Bay and College, Penumbra Press, 1991

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McCracken's fourth book of poems is marked by an engaging self-assurance. [Her] eye is caught by what she terms 'the strangeness of things outside ourselves/suddenly, here'. Despite the changing locales, fundamental issues of identity bind the poems together and are expressed by a poetic voice that quietly envelops.
David A. Kent - Canadian Book Review Annual


Blue Light, Bay and College

The way the street crosses itself
in a wirework of steel and shadow
is right
and not right.
 
It is natural the sun sets
behind us. Mid-March
and this is further north
than you have been in my country before.
I should be able to explain
the shifts that signal
a change of season, decipher bright
signatures of resumed spaces.
 
How to account 
for the angle of a glass wall,
the refraction of light
into light, trapezoid that baffles
even the photographer’s eye?
 
There is no saying away
the strangeness of things outside ourselves
suddenly, here. 
McCracken is an accomplished poet who knows how to manipulate the written word. Her lines are sparse, but exquisite. Her work is both personal and political, entrenched in history, yet bound in the present. This is work that is meant to be read and savoured.
Alexis Kienlen, Saskatchewan Publishers Group



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​Snaps
 
​i
Driving through rainsheets
we enter Nebraska in a fanfare
of green light.
 
He is learning to read maps
and I am pointing to a barn
with the roof blown off,
broad beams open to the falling sky.
 
ii
Trying to reconstruct the profile:
how he studied faces
without looking away from his hands
cradling the embered cigarette.
 
iii
Silos: sailors. Grain elevators. A Shawnee
saluting a skeletal transmission tower.
 
The midwest is linear, horizontal, parallel.
 
Picture it. Two roads unable to cross.
Hold it one sixteenth
of a second. And move on.
 
iv
Somewhere in the middle distance
a window opens:
the memory of a yellow bird
singing in the suns of Tennessee
keeps off the cold.
 
His blue voice combs the mares’ tails clouds
where in the latest photograph
they exit the frame.

The Constancy of Objects, Penumbra Press, 1988

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​The Constancy of Objects
 
The poem refuses to be
bound by the white perimeters of itself.
 
Like the killdeer’s freckled eggs
camouflaged on a scrape of  sand
it is there
and not there.
 
Sunstroked and lording it
over the raked rock garden 
the malachite tiger
(a gift from Russia)
is another story
altogether.
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Into Celebration​, Coach House Press, 1980

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​Liberty, Idaho, 1934
 
Seven old women
on a lawn
fenced off
for growing older
build churches
from chalk white
road stones.
 
Only one
sees the hawk.
 
From the steeple’s blistered spire
she sends up a flare 
and catches a ride
out.

    Reflections, Fiddlehead Poetry Books, 1978

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Kathleen McCracken is 16 years old, and though Reflections, her first book of poems, has the moody unevenness of precocious creativity, a number of poems reveal the poise of a mature artist. 
Cathleen Hoskins, Toronto Star


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Kathleen McCracken is as much a sixteen-year-old prodigy as the Ontario school system is likely to produce.
Warren Stevenson, Canadian Literature
Tombstone

This is a grave
of someone I do not know.

The weathered carving
says she had a husband
three sons
and was a Lamb of God.

It does not say
she preferred cherry soda,
read drugstore novels
on Sunday afternoons,
had four lovers
and felt no guilt.

I gave her these traits.

She had a name
I'll take for mine
when we close
​the iron gates.




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  • About
  • Books
  • Awards
  • Projects
  • Interviews and Recordnings
  • Literary Magazines & Anthologies
  • Readings and Launches
  • Contact