Other books that might interest you

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  Jogging with the Great Ray Charles

  Kenneth Sherman

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  A poetic masterclass from a writer at the height of his craft
   
  Kenneth Sherman’s work has always displayed a vibrant lyricism, so it’s no surprise that his powerful new collection contains a number of poems with musical motifs. In such pieces as “Clarinet,” “Transistor Sister,” and the book’s titular poem, Sherman ponders our human transience while searching for “a voice to stand time’s test.” Sherman also confronts health concerns in a language that is Shaker-plain. The book concludes with the sombre, compassionate, and truly remarkable seven-part “Kingdom,” a meditation on the plight of the dispossessed.
   
  In a Globe and Mail review of The Well: New and Selected Poems, Fraser Sutherland notes, “Sherman always seems to be listening to the voice of Canadian soil and landscape at the same time as he is attentive to the great European metaphysical theme of the soul in conflict with the world and time.” So it is with Jogging with the Great Ray Charles. Sherman has also included three brilliant translations of Yiddish poets that appeared in the Malahat Review’s “At Home in Translation” issue.

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  King Lear

  William Shakespeare

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  King Lear is one of Shakespeare’s greatest and darkest works. King Lear banishes his favorite daughter when she speaks out against him. However, he does not know that his two other daughters who pay tribute to him are in fact plotting against him. Shakespeare’s observations on the nature of human suffering and kinship are never better defined than in this play.

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  A Life Sentience

  David Catford

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  This  poetic book tells the story of David, a farmer born in 1960s Australia who was expected to carry on his family’s traditions on the land. We follow his life from birth to an imagined death, spanning a turbulent time when small rural communities across Australia collapsed.
   
  David’s  plans are upended in the 1990s as the country suffers deregulation of the grain markets and the onset of a devastating ten-year drought. He and farmers like him have their lives forever changed, swept away by harsh economic forces and drought as family farms shut down.
   
  The  book captures in verse the destruction of a cherished way of life for David, his neighbours, and rural towns. It recounts the tragedy of dreams broken when long-held farming traditions become unsustainable. By  telling one man’s story, it memorializes the wider loss of community 
  and livelihood faced by farming families across Australia in recent decades.

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  Fifty Shades of January - 50 of...

  William Shakespeare, William...

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  The year reaches its end with the Twelfth month.  The landscape may be bleak, a sculpture of lines, monochrome dominates.  The air carries the sounds of winter; wind, storms, silence.   
   
  1 - Fifty Shades of January - An Introduction 
  2 - Month of January by Hilaire Belloc 
  3 - Ode Written on 1st of January by Robert Southey 
  4 - Written January 1st, 1832 by Henry Alford 
  5 - January Cold Desolate by Christina Georgina Rossetti 
  6 - January 1st, 1828 by Nathaniel Parker Willis 
  7 - Written January 1st, 1792 by Janet Little 
  8 - The Darkling Thrush by Thomas Hardy 
  9 - Birds at Winter Nightfall (Triolet) by Thomas Hardy 
  10 - The Winters Are So Short by Emily Dickinson 
  11 - A Winter Day - Noon and Afternoon by Thomas Aird 
  12 - Winter Dusk by Sara Teasdale 
  13 - Winter Evening Hymn to My Fire by James Russell Lowell 
  14 - Winter Sunset by Katharine Tynan 
  15 - Sunset by Ann Radcliffe 
  16 - Winter Song by Katherine Mansfield 
  17 - Winter Nightfall by Robert Seymour Bridges 
  18 - A Winter Night by Sara Teasdale 
  19 - Written During an Aurora Borealis January 7th, 1831 by Henry Alford 
  20 - Spellbound by Emily Bronte 
  21 - Winter Heavens by George Meredith 
  22 - The Mirror For Magistrates - The Induction by Thomas Sackville 
  23 - Winter Stores By Charlotte Bronte 
  24 - Winter Violets by Alfred Austin 
  25 - To the Snow Drop by Charlotte Smith 
  26 - Sonnet 2 - When Forty Winters Shall Besiege Thy Brow by William Shakespeare 
  27 - A Calender of Sonnets - January by Helen Hunt Jackson 
  28 - Work Without Hope by Samuel Taylor Coleridge 
  29 - January 1795 by Mary Darby Robinson 
  30 - I Who All the Winter Through by Robert Louis Stevenson 
  31 - Winter by Khalil Gibran 
  32 - The White Snow by Guillaume Apollinaire 
  33 - A Winter's Sad Retreat by Daniel Sheehan 
  34 - Sonnet 97 - How Like a Winter Hath My Absence Been by William Shakespeare 
  35 - At Castle Wood by Emily Bronte 
  36 - Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening by Robert Frost 
  37 - The Divine Lullaby by Eugene Field 
  38 - A Tale Founded on a Fact Which Happened in January 1779 by William Cowper 
  39 - To Winter By William Blake 
  40 - Winter by Anne Bradstreet 
  41 - A Sonnet Occasioned by the Bad Weather Which Hindered the Sports at Newmarket in January 1616 by William Drummond 
  42 - A Shropshire Lad XVII - Twice a Week the Winter Through by A E Housman 
  43 - On the Discoveries of Captain Lewis, January the 14th 1807 by Joel Barlow 
  44 - The Battle of the Cowpens January 18th, 1781 by Thomas Dunn 
  45 - On My Thirty Third Birthday, January 22nd, 1821 by Lord Byron 
  46 - A Song For January 26th, 1824 by Charles Tompson 
  47 - Ode on the Present Time, 27th January, 1795 by Amelia Opie 
  48 - Arm the First Rifle Ballad, January 1852 by Martin Farquar Tupper 
  49 - January by Alice Carey 
  50 - Ode to the West Wind by Percy Bysshe Shelley 
  51 - As You Like It  Act II Sc VII - Blow Blow Thou Winter Wind by William Shakespeare

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  Poisoned Polluted

  Kathryn O'Reilly

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  'I have to fight back. But I can't fight back. It's so strong, the feeling is so strong. I can't breathe and there's a tapping a light tapping that's when I wake. I wake up.'
  Two sisters struggle to survive in the wake of a toxic childhood, bound by the legacy of what has been before. Each must find a way to build a life out of chaos. But what happens when the ties that bind become the thing that holds you back? Inextricably linked by blood, all they have is each other.
  Kathryn O'Reilly's play Poisoned Polluted premiered at the Old Red Lion Theatre, London, in November 2019.

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  This May Hurt A Bit

  Stella Feehily

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  A witty, tender, and occasionally surreal exploration of one family's experience of the NHS.
  A month after stating "we will stop the top-down reorganisation of the NHS that has got in the way of patient care", the government launched the biggest top-down reorganisation the service had seen in its 65-year history.
  Stella Feehily's play explores one family's journey through the digestive system of the NHS, and asks: what is the prognosis for this much-loved institution?
  This May Hurt A Bit premiered in March 2014, on a UK tour co-produced by Out of Joint and Octagon Theatre, Bolton.

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