Shall: ghazals

By: Catherine Owen

April 2006
88 pages | ISBN 1-894987-08-X
$17.00

In Shall: ghazals, Catherine Owen has created a collection of spare and haunting beauty. These poems, based on the Persian ghazal form, catalogue a series of losses. Those of a mother whose child is growing up and away, those of a wife losing a marriage, and overarching all of this, the loss nature suffers at the hands of humanity. Each poem is jewel-bright and sharply facetted. There are no excess words in Owen’s writing, her images and observations are all distilled to their essence. Shall: ghazals is a piercingly powerful collection.

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5
the Corazon after hours club
for Karen Moe

Many weeks of candle wax
: candles queasy on their stems.

Can you see the mountains?
Their strata shifts within me

as I drink. The singer on the folding chair
holds her guitar - a lover

without hope of leaving.
Cat’s claws on green walls. Ash

and peanuts in my hands. Ask
me again, if you can, about time.

Reviews

• A Will to Language (M. Travis Lane, The Fiddlehead 237, 9/1/2008)
• Varied Voices (Darlene Shatford, Canadian Literature, 6/1/2007)

Other Titles by Catherine Owen

• Catalysts (2011)
• Catalysts (2011)
• Seeing Lessons (2010)
• The Wrecks of Eden (2001)