CALM THINGS
The term still life did not come into being until 1650. The French adopted the term nature morte, dead nature, around 1750. The painter de Chirico was said to have preferred the Italian term vita silente. The Japanese, however, call still life, calm things. Calm Things is the title essay of this collection of meditations on what it is like to live with still life, and to live poetically. Both an insider’s glimpse into the precarious world of artist and poet, and a long gaze at objects and the calm and silence they hold, these essays prize the ordinary, radiant gift of common things.
(Palimpsest Press, 2008)
Read the title essay, "Calm Things" in Cezanne's Carrot.
Read "Still, Dead, Silent" in Prairie Schooner.
* Shortlisted for the 2009 Wilfred Eggleston Award for Non-Fiction.
"A writer looks deeply at paintings, and in the exercise of her deep attention, she learns and teaches as much about the art of writing as she does about the art of painting. It is a book about one art form that guides a reader towards a deeper understanding of all art forms. But most of all, it is a book that both embodies and instructs us on the need for, and place of, loving attention and receptivity in our over-crowded, jangling lives."
"Structurally, each paragraph works like a painting. You could, if you wanted, read each one in isolation, like a lyric poem."
(Susan Olding, author of Pathologies: A Life in Essays)
Calm Things by Shawna Lemay is the most beautifully written, generous and honest collection of personal essays that I've read in ages. Thought-provoking to say the least. Because the clean, pitch-perfect prose never calls attention to itself, I was left looking at a world through Lemay's eyes and with Lemay's clear, wide-angled vision. What I saw was a well-rounded world. A moving world. A world I both know and don't know."
(Brenda Schmidt, Alone on a Boreal Stage)
BLUE FEAST
Blue Feast, a beautiful collection of poems from eloquent Canadian wordsmith Shawna Lemay, examines motherhood, marriage, and the nature of everyday life. In these original, engrossing poems Lemay delves into universal feelings of isolation and the painfulness of writing. Her poetry strains between light and dark, exultation and sorrow.
(NeWest Press, 2005)
“This is a must-read book that dares to poetically address accessible universal human realities like motherhood, marriage and other similar personal and domestic journeys. Of course, like good still life paintings, while the subject matter might seem mundane, it’s a highly dramatic form (literally a mini-theatrical mise-en-scene crossed with an altar-piece) that an agile artist like Lemay can endlessly plumb for greater (if subtle) political and philosophical ends.” (Gilbert Bouchard)
“a thoughtful meditation on the ephemeral and the numinous that reside in the corners of everyday domestic life…an abundant book, overflowing with emotion and ideas.”
(Alison Pick, Globe and Mail)
STILL
These poems were written as an exercise towards perfection throught the opposite of perfection. Certainly, they fail. I'd also say, they try. As Samuel Beckett said, "Try again. Fail again. Fail better." The first section of this book, 'Anatomy of a Still Life' was written over a period of 52 weeks, as something resembling an artist's studio exercises.
These poems take to heart a quotation by Joseph Campbell. He says, "Any object, any stick, stone, plant, beast, or human being, can be placed this way in the center of a circle of mystery, to be regarded in its dimension of wonder, and so made to serve as a perfectly proper support for meditation."
(published by the author, 2003)
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AGAINST PARADISE
Shawna Lemay’s rich, amused, insistent, ingenious meditation on Venice will surprise readers with its peculiar grace. Here is the work of an elegant raconteur; a self-effacing, sharp-eared occupier of voices; a high-toned, compassionate gossip. From many mouths, she offers us the city, doomed, full of light.
Lemay’s Venice is a small, crowded community of the delightfully eccentric dead. Through her quirky dramatic monologues, each one shimmering with a companionable intelligence, we meet them – George Eliot, Peggy Guggenheim, Lord Byron, Mary Shelley, Effie Ruskin, Ernest Hemingway, Titian, various unnamed others; we meet them in mid-speech; it seems they have never stopped talking, talking, telling now (or refusing still to tell) their secrets, protecting their vanities still, finally saying what they truly think. Lemay has given us an entire world, dark, haughty, watery, beautiful, full of voices, sedimented with stories.
(McClelland & Stewart, 2001)
“…a rich collection of poems celebrating Venice in the eternal present tense of art and literature.” (Todd Babiak)
“Lemay has a sharp eye for detail, a gift for the apt phrase, and a sardonic wit that, in the best of these poems, allows both deep emotion and a clear recognition of the follies of lonely lost humans.” (Douglas Barbour)
“There are some finely honed and beautiful poems in this collection, in pieces that can be admired not only for craft and wry humour, but, more important, enjoyed.”
(Globe and Mail)
“Elegant. Lush. Decadent.” (matt robinson)
ALL THE GOD-SIZED FRUIT
Shawna Lemay scrutinizes some of the best-known art masterpieces of the Western world, alerting her readers to the power and peril of seduction. All the God-sized Fruit melds the sister arts - poetry and painting - in a sensual exploration of history, forgery, and violation. In poems rich with sensory pleasure, Lemay explores the place where image and inspiration meet.
* Winner of the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award and the Stephan G. Stephannson Award for Poetry
(McGill-Queen's University Press, 1999)
“There is a searchingness in the imaginative detail of these canvases, and a strong sense of a ruined world gently picked up and turned in the hand, under the eye, the details of chaos transformed into the ink of re-creation.” (Jeffery Donaldson)
“The book is engaging, her voice assured, her critical eye aware of the darker implications behind the suffusing light emanating from the glossy oil on a canvas.” (Paulo da Costa)
RED VELVET FOREST
The poems in Red Velvet Forest become the trail that must be followed back through a dark wood reminiscent of the forest that consumed Grimm's Hansel and Gretel. The poet's quest is to find a magic clearing in the forest she remembers from childhood where she first experienced silence in nature, but the way there is fraught with the twists and deceptions of memory.
(The Muses' Company, 2009)
"Tracking the dead ends of suburbia through to the dream forests of childhood, Lemay's "ink trails" are "an enticing undergrowth."
These are poems that read with an intense privacy, as diary entries, raw and loose, written as if never to be seen."
Jennifer Still, Winnipeg Free Press
BOOKS
