Kirjahaku

Part history, part invention, Muybridge's Horse is a sensual biographical long poem that follows the career of Eadweard Muybridge, a nineteenth-century British-born photographer whose studies of bodies in motion led to the invention of moving pictures. Whether navigating hallucinogenic American deserts, violent coastal geographies, or a feral 1850s San Francisco, Rob Winger's tale uses an inventive combination of poetic styles and voices, recounting early attempts to capture images on glass. Searching out stereoscopic beauty, Winger's version of Muybridge carries portable darkrooms from the heights of Yosemite's domes to the depths of the North and South American coastlines, and ultimately onto an 1878 race track, where a battery of fifty cameras settles a bet about a horse's stride, forever changing the world's understanding of movement. Charged with murder, accused of neurosis, compelled to record ruins and wage-slavery, Muybridge conveys the violence implied by the photographic act and the blunt details hidden behind our histories.

In this eagerly anticipated follow-up to his award-winning, critically lauded debut, Rob Winger's sophomore collection, The Chimney Stone, bends the contemporary lyric into startling new shapes. Concentrating on a splendid mess of headlines, wars, politics, relationships and artistic influences, Winger's ghazals ask us how to negotiate the complex commitments and chaotic tumult of our dailylives. Making use of the ghazal's original address to both a secular lover and a sacred ethics, Winger's four sections move from examinations of gender in "Iron John" and "Bloody Mary," to an ironic investigation of common experience in "Idiot Wind," to a record of both human rights abuses and personal epiphany in "Blind Date." In the process, Winger not only engages in dialogue with other poets--John Thompson, Phyllis Webb, Adrienne Rich, Ghalib, and more--but also welcomes other voices, measures, and musical phrases into his couplets. Here, Rimbaud rubs shoulders with Joe Strummer and David Byrne; Dylan exchanges one-liners with Gaston Bachelard; Johnny Cash spars with the Fisk Jubilee Singers; and Gretzky makes a pass to a smooth right winger. Drifting from razor-carved sternums, to Lhasa runways, to Southeast Asian temples and beaches, to eighteenth-century shipwrecks, bloody tanks, rusty apartheid, blind genocide and burning teddy bears, The Chimney Stone urges us to re-examine not only how we order the contemporary world, but also how we become its citizens or revolutionaries, grandparents or kids, protestors or politicians. Ethically charged, tenderly observed, and masterfully realized, Winger's poems are a vital addition to the ghazal's continued evolution.

This is the third book of poetry and first collection of occasional poems by the author of the 2007 Globe 100 book, Muybridges Horse: Governor General and Trillium Awards nominee, Rob Winger. Driven by an attempt to understand how to reorder common experience, the books transitional sections -- Set", Re/Set", and Lect -- all intertwine and overlap, thematically and intuitively linked by the extensive range and depth of Wingers poetics. While each section is discrete, each is also in harmony with its neighbours. The "Re/set" sections revive cliches of Canadian lyricism -- landscape and maple syrup, Icarus falling and human-rights rhetoric, war and ancestral migration, death, love, and disease -- not only to critique but also to validate the experiential urgency of poetic reflection, while the Set sections harness Wingers vernacular voice in a "struggle for self-definition against powerfully pedestrian political and economic systems". "They signed Yu Darvish without seeing his fork", Winger writes in one poem. "They signed their books without looking up at us / They gave you fries with that without even asking".Such a balance of agency and inaction is also central in Old Hats final section, Lect", a simmering simulation of grad-school jargon, sailor slang, plumbing terminology, and GPS directives that exposes the limitations of esoteric linguistic ontologies by moving from general observations to those of increasingly expert understanding. While rich with advice to Keep your personal longings with you at all times", "Old Hat" is also generous, incisive, boisterous, and funny, a book about place, but also about understanding and situation. Spoken through cliches, vernacular, and jargon, Old Hat is just as familiar as it is odd, just as comforting as disquieting, an exceptional meditation on what it means to think about writing.