Share
Copy link
This collection is a wry, witty look at how humans create mythologies.
Mythologies are large things, continuous across the generations, marrying humanity to earth, sky and seasons. But myth-making is more local — a magpie impulse that catches sight of glittery things from the corner of its eye and builds them into some home structure. Myth makes do with what it finds nearby.
This book's poems are made up from life in office towers, malls and coffee shops, in a northern Alberta city that is like and unlike any other place. The title series creates a year-long cycle of urban moons, named for objects in the city environment – just as any hunting and gathering culture has named the moons of the year for objects important to it. The collection also includes the sequence, Scenes from the Sugar Bowl Café, which won the Canadian Poetry Association’s Shaunt Basmajian chapbook contest.
As befits the end of a raggle-tag century, the myths and momentary gods invented here are mainly satirical. And yet, like any mythology, they are about the possibilities of an ideal world and the gaps between that world and the mundane.
Published by Broken Jaw Press
ISBN 1-896647-11-1
Experience a poem
Audio: The Moon of Strippers – performed with Nora Bumanis
Recognition
The manuscript won the Poets’ Corner Award, sponsored by Broken Jaw Press, in 1999. It was also a finalist for the City of Edmonton Book Prize and for the Alberta Writers Guild’s Stephan G. Stephansson Award for Poetry.
Reviews
>> Major’s collection of poetry casts a wide net over the diversity of urban life in Edmonton. She plays mythic space and urban space against each other in wonderfully provocative ways.
- Jury comments, City of Edmonton Book Prize, 2000.
>> These are inventive, humourous pieces that cruise the urban landscape. The book is broken into four sections, and Major has great fun mythologizing the modern city and its inhabitants. … This book takes a clever idea and brings it to fruition through Major’s flair for poetic narrative.
- Prairie Fire Review of Books
>> Alice Major’s focus is the literary equivalent of many postmodern artists: the core of a large city. Out of its barrenness and ugliness she creates a cluster of myths, which, in her own words, are “about possibilities of an ideal world and the gaps between that world and the mundane.” With her ability to forge stunning metaphors she has created one of the most imaginative collections of poetry to be found anywhere. In so doing, she makes the world where generations “have emerged and died/with no glimpse of galaxies” an exciting and almost inhabitable place.
- Robert Hawkes, PCA Judge
>> This collection features brilliantly inventive, funny and poignant myths. In the titular sequence every one of these narratives satisfies the child’s desire for a clear-cut tale, the city-dweller’s hunger for legendary aetiologies to equal those that dignify the countryside, and the adult’s love for a good mix of intellect and humour.
- Eric Miller, PCA Judge
<< Lattice of the Years Corona Radiata >>
