Prairie Harbour - Softcover

In this contrapuntal follow-up to Governor General’s Award finalist Discovery Passages, Garry Thomas Morse traces multiple lines of his mixed ancestry. These include the nomadic pre-historical” movements of Wakashan speakers who were later to form various West Coast First Nations; the schismatic mindset of Jedidiah Morse, the father of American geography” ;and eternal struggles of European Jewish relations, artists, and close friends against perennial anti-Semitism. Set around the vigilantly maintained border/lines that mark the relatively unsung” decline of natural prairie life, this unromantic wrecklogue” radiates outward from a new real-estate development in Regina, Saskatchewan.

The first section, Company Romance,” is a sequence of sardonic heritage minute” poems that examine the intensely aggressive capitalist aspects of colonization that drove the fur trade in Manitoba and deeply influenced our contemporary sense of cultural and national identity. They also draw parallels between the shift in nomadic hunter/warrior culture to our own transformation as global consumers.

The second part, Prairie Harbour,” a long poem in twenty-four parts, takes the form of postexilic elegies that transcend the dominant tradition of Canadian prairie poetry, infusing it with epical echoes of poets John Clare, Charles Olson, Louis Zukofsky, and William Carlos Williams. The work reaches its stride in a hearing of the Regina Symphony Orchestra’s performance of Gustave Mahler’s Fifth Symphony, which includes a French horn of warning for the have-not” province.

The finale offers aesthetic fragmentation of Stephane Mallarmé’s Un Coup de Dés and The Untroubled Mind,” a poem by Saskatchewan-born abstract expressionist Agnes Martin, salvaging space for an inner landscape and a harbour” for the mind.

Garry Thomas Morse’s poetry books with LINEBooks include sonic riffs on Rainer Maria Rilke’s sonnets inTransversals for Orpheus and a tribute to David McFadden’s poetic prose inStreams. His poetry books with Talonbooks include a homage to San Francisco Renaissance poet Jack Spicer inAfter Jack, and an exploration of his mother’s Kwakwaka’wakw native ancestry inDiscovery Passages, which was a finalist for the Governor General’s Award for Poetry and the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize.Discovery Passages was also voted One of the Top Ten Poetry Collections of 2011 by theGlobe and Mail and One of the Best Ten Aboriginal Books from the past decade by CBC’s8th Fire.

Morse’s books of fiction include his collection Death in Vancouver, and the three books in The Chaos! Quincunx series:Minor Episodes / Major Ruckus (2013 ReLit Award finalist), Rogue Cells / Carbon Harbour (2014 ReLit Award finalist), andMinor Expectations, all published by Talonbooks.

Morse is a casual commentator for Jacket2 and his work continues to appear in a variety of publications and is studied at various Canadian universities, including the University of British Columbia. He currently resides in Winnipeg, Manitoba.