Order Put Flowers Around Us and Pretend We’re Dead
Put Flowers Around Us and Pretend We’re Dead: New and Selected Poems appears on the CBC Books Poetry Collections to Watch for List.
“Put Flowers Around Us and Pretend We’re Dead is a beautiful collection of Catherine Graham’s award-winning poetry. Spanning twenty years of writing these poems trace Graham’s arc from ARC Poetry Magazine’s initial observation that “Graham is a young poet whose work should be closely attended to” to the Toronto Star writing “Catherine Graham’s seventh book of poetry is an intricate reverie.” Poems within this collection circle around profound themes, including family, healing, loss and love, but they are written with a delight in the natural world, a delicate line and ethereal imagery. Here, birds are gathered in bouquets, a ghost is a fold in the mind and the snow holds light. Put Flowers Around Us and Pretend We’re Dead is a must-have volume from a much-loved poet.”
— Wolsak and Wynn / Buckrider Books
“These poems are so good, so well constructed and finely tuned they seem to come from a timeless place, one rich with myth, both classical and newly imagined, yet within and underneath the words there’s the sound of a watch ticking, ticking. This is a book to keep by your bedside, to read when you dream and when you awaken. The poems will disturb, they will shatter, they will mend. They do what a poem in these troubled times can do.”
— Lorna Crozier, author of God of Shadows and What the Soul Doesn’t Want
“New collection showcases Catherine Graham’s consistent poetics.”
— Steven W. Beattie, Quill & Quire
Read or listen to Graham’s interview on CBC Books. “I’m interested in liminal spaces, between things, the real, the imagined, the dream life, the waking life, the present, the past, places of tension and what hovers in those spaces.”
“Apart from being a lovely person and one of the style icons of Canadian arts and letters, Catherine is also a “wicked smart poet” … and a master of compression…. Her short poems are spring-loaded miniatures filled with surprising juxtapositions that cause you to think for a long time afterwards. … Graham’s poems are alive with secrets… I sense the action of spirit undergoing form, and I always look forward to what that process reveals…Who, in her position, having lost both parents when she was barely out of her teens, would have the luxury of maintaining hard boundaries between herself and the dead? When reading her work, I’m often struck by how close the dead are. They feel like dinner companions, people you can talk to, listen to, and learn from. A watchful presence just beyond the vale… Graham’s poems urge us to have the courage to “dive in,” to “turn to water before it freezes.” They urge us to be alive and to keep bringing the world into being through our words.”
— Lee Parpart, from her introduction to the CAA event: An Intimate Evening of Poetry with Catherine Graham
“’We carry mystery as gift,’ writes Catherine Graham in one poem in this collection which spans 20 years. True to that line her poems are often enigmatic, dreamlike scenarios whose images evoke fairy tales or mythology.”
— Barb Carey, Toronto Star
“On any number of levels Graham is a poet who explores the world around us, as well as in-between states, and her dialectic of flint and fire results in passionate lyrics, profound observation, and startling insights….Flora and fauna suffuse Graham’s poetry from hatched bird to seed, bloom, roots, leaf, and petal. Silence rearranges sound and is a kind of flight… All of Graham’s creatures bound and scurry from the page between lines and around the sounds of stanzas….Graham’s other realms explore the subconscious, dreamscapes of hush and hint, haunt of silence and sounds, surreal metaphors in nature, friction igniting fiction, and vice versa.”
— Michael Greenstein, Miramiichi Reader
“Many poets leap all over the place in subject matter, but Graham remains in her mystical quarry of magical, tragic and transcending images, plumbing ever more intensely in order to draw up new nuggets that shine like the lines, “Cakes of light silenced” (Blue Edges), “you miss the owl-winter, the…crizzling lake…twiggy cup to sink into” …If you have a taste for Graham’s extremely-precise and haunting style, almost like an erasure of elements of Plath undertaken in Roethke’s greenhouse in an Arthur Rackham fable, then there is a plethora of pieces here for the reader who wants to read the collections they haven’t been able to locate or just have them all in one consistent thread, elegiac fairytales among the “fragile stars” and “metal implants” and the “there, there” of time.”
— Catherine Owen, Marrow Reviews