Book DescriptionTaking Shape is about love, its powerful personal history, its public geography and geology, how it changes, how it shifts itself into different forms and temporalities, and how love profoundly alters an individual's point of view and the world at large.Finally, Taking Shape is also about the nature of shape, how the very form or vessel, like language itself, persuades us to take on as well as escape from the many breathtaking landscapes and mysteries, clues and possibilities of our shared lives. Praise & ReviewsEdward Carson's linked poems praise at once the logic of love and the place of love. Taking Shape combines his elegance of style and imagination (think of a musical composition) with the immediacy of the erotic. A rare performance.Robert Kroetsch, author of The Hornbooks of Rita K Ed Carson’s Taking Shape is a gem. In this new book of interconnected poems, in an attempt to name what love is, to give it a shape that can be grasped, like a metaphysical lapidarist he facets and re-facets it's language so that the light it reveals refracts and reflects within it and "exceeds its reason for being". “We come away believing in the shape of something with no shape at all.” Brian Henderson, author of Nerve Language Ed Carson’s linked poems, Taking Shape, rising and falling in easy cadences, examine how things take shape in the world. Yet for all their fluidity, these poems have a blade-sharp edge. Showing us “held together in a fierce ring of light,” they reveal, poignantly, what it is that makes us human. Anne Simpson, author of Loop and Quick Love, the argument goes, is not a force that can be contained: Ed Carson’s poems in Taking Shape don’t attempt to bind the un-bindable -- they approximate love’s flavour, turning outward to the other and inward to the self, and also wandering among love's mysteries, This meditation on love over time rewards re-reading: the reach for the divine is threaded through with human failings: these strike me as not only graceful, but truthful poems. Marilyn Bowering, author of Green and What It Takes To Be Human "Edward Carson's Taking Shape is a feast of immanent thinking. It shows that time-worn tools can indeed, when used with patience, sensitivity, rigour, and devotion, yield pleasures rare and contemporary." Mark Truscott, author of Said Like Reeds or Things Edward Carson's Taking Shape is a subtle meditation on love and change, lovers caught up in the changes and rhythms of life on this mortal earth. The elegant couplets repeat phrases, words, and images to hypnotic effect. In a manner reminiscent of E.D. Blodgett's Apostrophes--yet entirely its own--Taking Shape in its play on repetition and variation traces "the faint / shape of things taking shape," evoking the weather of love. Hilary Clark, author of The Dwelling of Weather “Within Ed Carson’s grave meditation on love we can hear sounding the ghost of our old, stately, inexhaustible pentameter. As his measured words resonate and rhyme, accumulating weight, so do his ideas. This is mature poetry that appeals to both the heart and the head—accomplished, thoughtful, and moving.” Keith Maillard, author of Gloria “With evocative imagery and the keen eye of a photographer, Carson gives shape to a language of the heart.” Christopher Dewdney, author of Signal Fires and Acquainted with the Night "Like ocean tides these words pull and push our logic, hearts and spirit into a communion of evolving spaciousness. Taking Shape is powerful and provocative." Lucinda M. Vardey, editor of God in All Worlds, The Flowering of the Soul & co-author of Being Generous. AuthorEdward Carson is twice winner of the E.J. Pratt Poetry Award in Canada, and is the author of a previously published book of poetry, Scenes.Over the past thirty years he has had a variety of careers involving the word, including co-founder/editor of the literary periodical, Rune, and lecturer in English Literature at the University of Toronto. He has served as president of several major book publishing companies, including Penguin Group (Canada), Pearson Technology Group Canada, Distican (Simon and Schuster), HarperCollinsCanada, and, while Vice President of publishing, founded the successful indigenous publishing list of Random House of Canada. Throughout his publishing career he taught the business of publishing at Ryerson University, Humber College, and as co-director of the Banff Publishing Workshop. He also has participated on various Boards of Directors, including PEN Canada, BookNet Canada, and is a past president of the Canadian Publishers’ Council. At present he is Chief Business Officer and Associate Director, University of Toronto, School of Continuing Studies. As an editor and publisher, he has worked with an array of accomplished local and international authors, including Carol Shields, Dennis Lee, Marilyn Bowering, John Irving, D.G. Jones, Keith Maillard, Julian Barnes, John Ralston Saul, Barry Lopez, Robert Kroetsch, Eli Mandel, and Janice Kulyk Keefer. Recent showings, and the growing success of his digital photography, have integrated his fascination with the written word and the visual image, expanding the borders and potential for his art (www.photographicart.ca). |
 Taking Shape by Edward Carson Paperback: 48 pages Publisher: Porcupine's Quill; 1st edition (Mar 1 2008) ISBN-10: 0889843058 ISBN-13: 978-0889843059 In Canada Ask your local bookstore to order Taking Shape. Canada has some of the finest bookstores to be found anywhere! Order from the Internet Amazon Chapters/Indigo Northwest Passages University of Toronto Press Bookstores wishing to add their site to this list, contact us Contact the University of Toronto Press toll-free in Canada 1 (800) 565-9523 Contact The Porcupine's Quill 
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| Copyright 2008 Edward Carson |
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