The Elements - by Erín Moure (Paperback)

About the Book

"The Elements is a family book, a thinker's biography in poetry, and a polylingual homage, constructed on a double axis. Poems about and for Moure's late father - accepting his dementia as a real way of thinking "world" and "self" in a struggle against invasive powers - are braced alongside poems invoking the struggle of Galician peasants against the invasion of the armies of Napoleon. It is a book about tenderness, and about The Good, in the face of destructions. By celebrating our ability to think and to revolt, it defends the human pull toward happiness and sovereignty, toward life, toward living. "The infinitely transmissible," it says, "demands this polyvalent body."--

Book Synopsis

The new collection from Governor General's Literary Award-winning poet and translator Erín Moure is a book about tenderness, and about The Good, in the face of destruction.

The Elements is a family book, a thinker's biography in poetry, and a polylingual homage. Poems about and for Moure's late father -- accepting his dementia as a real way of thinking "world" and "self" in a struggle against invasive powers -- are braced alongside poems invoking the struggle of Galician peasants against the invasion of the armies of Napoleon. It is a book about tenderness, and about The Good, in the face of destructions. By celebrating our ability to think and to revolt, it defends the human pull toward happiness and sovereignty, toward life, toward living. "The infinitely transmissible," it says, "demands this polyvalent body."

Review Quotes

"A formally exciting work." -- Emily Urquhart, Montreal Review of Books

"Moure's wit and her eye for the beautiful infuse the poems . . . The collection is intensely rewarding, tender, and human as it attempts to name the unnameable, to bear the unbearable." -- Lynn Thomson, Canadian Notes & Queries