VOX HUMANA 
BOOK LAUNCHES & READINGS

Main-à-Dieu, Cape Breton
Friday August 24, 2012 - 7:00 p.m.
Poetry with a View 2012
Main-à-Dieu Coastal Discovery Centre
Poets:
Sean Howard Richard Marchand
E. Alex Pierce Stewart Donovan
 

LISTEN TO INTERVIEW WITH E ALEX PIERCE

WHAT'S HAPPENING...

A Very Long Engagement -  CURATED BY FRANCES DORSEY

Panel discussion with artists and curator:  Friday 18 January at 2 PM

The six artists in this exhibition investigate the subject of time, both literally and symbolically, through the use of their chosen textile materials and processes, and in the concepts that they explore. Beginning with the idea of a continuous filament or thread or thought, all have taken very different trajectories, using media that demand high levels of skill and experience, and long years of practice. Most of the artists have been working for many decades in their fields, exercising the consummate skill of those who know their media inside out, improvising seamlessly while maintaining a conceptual rigour. In all of their practices, the subject matter is also informed by the material and process choices exercised along the way.

Exploring definitions of landscape art and its interaction with built architecture featuring artists like Marlene Creates, Peter Dykhuis, Lorraine Field, Kelly Mark, Camille Zakharia and Carl Zimmerman.

This selection of contemporary works from the Permanent Collection examines how landscape is experienced and represented. This extends beyond the visual conventions of traditional art to encompass cultural mapping, memory, oral history and digital technologies relating to weather forecasting, flight and global positioning. Whereas tradi- tional landscape has reproduced romantic and culturally biased ideas of the physical world we inhabit—often removing it from, or effacing, embodied histories of social conflict, colonialism and environmental degration—artists in this exhibition address such issues as how geopolitical relations are inscribed on landscape; how we inhabit space somatically; the visual construction of landscape and its interaction with architecture and the built environment. (from Visual Arts News)

Brian Bartlett   Matt Cornfield   Lorri Neilsen Glenn 
Sue Goyette    Heather Jessup   Carole Glasser Langille
E. Alex Pierce    Peter Sanger   Harry Thurston

The Wardroom (A&A Building)
University of King’s College   6350 Coburg Road, Halifax

"Taken together, these poems perform a universal voice—“the under-singing.” This is also the voice of the book’s narrator: it is her story, though its versions are legion." Jane Monroe - Malahat Review

"...interesting and allusive... invocation and a lament for what has gone and been lost." Heather Craig - Telegraph-Journal 

"... memories that transcend the personal to become universal... neither sentimental nor solemn, but retrospective and elegiac, lyrical and optimistic about the power of the human voice to communicate." - 
Margaret Patricia Eaton -Atlantic Books Today

"These poems teem with personal, historical, and mythical stories... a collection full of history and memory, and with the absences that produce them." Moberley Luger - Canadian Literature online 

"Whatever the subject, the real strength of Pierce’s work lies in the richness of its landscape which is forever opening out before us, transfigured by an inner music and wonder and light.” John Glenday

E. Alex Pierce lives in East Sable River, Nova Scotia where she is developing a centre for writers and artists. In her earlier life she taught voice, movement, and mask for the theatre, and created original collaborative works with visual artists and composers. 

For ten years she taught creative writing (playwriting & poetry) at Cape Breton University, and is currently Series Editor for the CBU Press publication, The Essential Cape Breton Library. 

She holds a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from Warren Wilson College, and has been a participant in the Writing Studio at the Banff Centre. 

Her work has been in anthologized in Words Out There: Women Writers in Atlantic Canada (Roseway); Best Canadian Poetry 2008 (Tightrope); and in the recently published Undercurrents: New Voices in Canadian Poetry (Cormorant). 

Her book, Vox Humana, has just been released from Brick Books. Pierce will be offering readings and workshops throughout Nova Scotia in 2011-2012.

Poems of great passion and tenderness, as close to rapture as a writer can get and still hold on. 

E. Alex Pierce’s voice can be heard echoing down the long corridors of memory and myth. It’s not that these poems live in the past; instead, they manage to bring it back to life with uncanny sensual details and an urgency that makes you realize some fires never really go out. Vox Humana is all lilt and discipline in its courtliness, its surrender to the theatre of the moment at its most alive.

Pump organ, stops labelled

vox, vox, vox - tremolo, bellows filling air.
 

Take this creature into your throat pipe. Gristle,

heft, and hide. Rasp, slide the whistle - the alder

cuts its throat to speak its sound.
                                                           - from “Vox animalia”

 “‘Poetry’, someone once wrote, ‘is the music of consciousness’, and Vox Humana is indeed a rich diapason rooted in the landscape of Nova Scotia’s Sable River. But the wonderful thing about the collection is its lightness and optimism – though its subject matter is often love and loss, it can be retrospective without being nostalgic, and elegiac without overbearing solemnity. Good poetry is always redemptive, and one leaves this collection refreshed, exhilarated and renewed.

“Its scope is wide: beautifully crafted family reminiscences; Bach and Beethoven; Raphael and Goltzius; Shakespeare; the Greek Myths and the fate of the Romanovs. But whatever the subject, the real strength of Pierce’s work lies in the richness of its landscape which is forever opening out before us, transfigured by an inner music and wonder and light.” – John Glenday

Vox Humana
New book of poetry by E Alex Pierce from Brick Books

• READ ABOUT VOX
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• LISTEN TO INTERVIEW WITH E ALEX PIERCE

See Brick Books web site