The past infuses the present in the poems gathered in this collection. Painting a transformative wind helps restore a culture to a decimated people. Everyday events trigger a yearning for love from those already departed. A goldfish experiences poetry for the first time, again. An arduous ascent through the Peruvian mountains leads to a stone that stops the sun. By turns ironic, comic, imagistic, experimental, these poems ask what's next, and how do we get there.
Myth is written on the spine of the Americas. / Long ago, in the time of making / the Word was unspoken. / The Word was nothing / and the something that came from that. / The Word was the foetal murk / and the emergent cry into light.
Blood Rises is a collection that moves, enriches, and gives powerful meaning to life. David Haskins records scenes in vivid poetic detail, from the sublime experience of hiking at Machu Picchu to the ordinary chore of pruning a raspberry bush. He writes of the heroes and traditions of Canadian poetry with affection, nostalgia, and wicked wit. Above all, like our strongest poets, he writes against despair. In these poems, even the simplest activities—moving a file cabinet or painting a room—are imbued with deep emotion, and throughout, the beauty of the natural world graces the human soul with hope: “For one night/my tree/harbours your stars.”
Catherine Hunter, author of St. Boniface Elegies
In
Blood Rises, David Haskins presents himself as a mature writer willing to avoid the easy topics in favour of driving to the heart of things, be it the culture of the much-abused Haida of Canada’s West Coast or the violence in Guatemala, Columbia, and Mexico or the fact that our own government has been complicit in torture when dealing with suspected terrorists. This book also contains a searching section on the death of the poet’s wife that explores his inner world of grief, and closes with a bold ascent to the fields of the sun at Machu Picchu.
Blood Rises is an impressive contribution to Canadian poetry.
James Deahl, author of Travelling the Lost Highway