Guernica Editions
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Eleventh Toe
Guernica Editions, Spring 2001
64 pages
Trade Paperback
ISBN13: 9781550711295
ISBN10: 1550711296
English
$5.95 Canada, $5.95 US
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Careful craftsmanship is rare today. So often poetry breaks down into mere announcement, propaganda or banal statement: but not these poems. Julie Roorda has succeeded in finding the right image for the right moment, and she has accomplished even more through her ability to challenge and control the forms and the music that make for fine poetry. This first book is a remarkable accomplishment, and something that poetry-lovers can be very thankful for. -- Bruce Meyer
The open grave is lined with astroturf./ His adult children gather/ a step off the mud/ and sing the hymns he depends on/ to conjure the psalmy landscape/ of his heaven.
Julie Roorda is a discovery. She is one of the best young poets of the modern generation, the group of thirty-year-olds, in whose hands we are provided with the gift of beauty and the poetic relevancy of life. We know now, with the publication of this, her first collection of poems, that Ms. Roorda is in the vanguard of the overall Renaissance in Canadian poetry. This is a spiritualist conversation conducted with conscience, with ancestry, and with the spirit of man (and of woman); and which wrestles successfully. with the elemental questions of our contemporary morality, with warmth, with wonder, and with humour. This collection poses religious and ordinary social questions that demand honesty through introspection. the kind of honesty that all good poetry must be obliged to encompass. Ms. Roorda is a laudatory, rich addition to our excellence in Canadian poetry.
Austin Clarke
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