• Shall: ghazals

Shall: ghazals

by Catherine Owen

May 1, 2006 | ISBN 978-1-894987-08-0 | 88 Pages

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In Shall: ghazals, Catherine Owen has created a collection of spare and haunting beauty. These poems, based on the Persian ghazal form, catalogue a series of losses. Those of a mother whose child is growing up and away, those of a wife losing a marriage, and overarching all of this, the loss nature suffers at the hands of humanity. Each poem is jewel-bright and sharply facetted. There are no excess words in Owen’s writing, her images and observations are all distilled to their essence. Shall: ghazals is a piercingly powerful collection.

Excerpt

"5"
the Corazon after hours club
for Karen Moe

Many weeks of candle wax
: candles queasy on their stems.

Can you see the mountains?
Their strata shifts within me

as I drink. The singer on the folding chair
holds her guitar - a lover

without hope of leaving.
Cat’s claws on green walls. Ash

and peanuts in my hands. Ask
me again, if you can, about time.

    • A Will to Language (M. Travis Lane, The Fiddlehead 237, 9/1/2008)
      "I highly recommend Catherine Owen's new collection of Canadian ghazals, Shall:ghazals, and I shall be reading them again and again."
    • Varied Voices (Darlene Shatford, Canadian Literature, 6/1/2007)
      "Owen's collection of ponderings on the poet's uneasy relationship with language deserves more than a single reading; the poems are complex and compelling, worthy of study."

  • Catherine Owen is the author of ten collections of poetry and three of prose, including her compilation of interviews on writing called The Other 23 & a Half Hours: Or Everything You Wanted to Know that Your MFA Didn’t Teach You (Wolsak & Wynn, 2015) and her short story collection, The Day of the Dead (Caitlin Press, 2016). Her work has been nominated for awards, toured Canada eight times and appeared in anthologies, as well as translations. She has been employed by both the Locations and the Props department in TV land, plays metal bass and has two cats: Solstice and Equinox.