Yes
Yes, Rosemary Griebel, Poetry, ISBN 978-1-897181-49-2, 84 pages, Paperback, 6″ x 9″, $16.00
There are no pyrotechnics of language, no dazzling or bizarre images, and yet – quietly, cumulatively – the poems succeed in evoking a time of life, the domesticity of transience, a recognition of what it is to be young, of what it is to be alive. —Robyn Sarah, from her commentary as Judge, Freefall Magazine Poetry Contest
“The poems here are marvelous, They are prayers we speak to our ‘crouched hearts.’ They ask us to ‘get into sorrow’s truck and ride.’ A delight to read, this book is the work of a truly gifted poet to be grateful for.” —Patrick Lane
Born in the farming community of Castor, Alberta, Rosemary Griebel grew up on the prairies. There she experienced nature as both immense and intimate. It’s common to say that there is little room to romanticize nature when the lives and deaths of animals are commonplace and all around you. Yet Rosemary, currently Special Projects Manager with the Calgary Public Library, where she has worked for 20 years, always knew experience as both something to be felt and something to be spoken of. Rosemary’s poems have been published on CBC’s radio program Anthology, in national journals, in the Calgary Transit’s “Poetry in Motion” series of in-vehicle posters, and in chapbooks by Leaf Press. In the past two years, her poems have won FreeFall magazine’s national poetry contest three times – in the second year of the contest, two of her poems, unknown to the judges to be by the same author, tied for first place.
- Shortlisted - The Gerald Lampert Prize for Poetry, sponsored by the League of Canadian Poets.
- Shortlisted – The Stephan G. Stephansson Award for Poetry (Supported by Stephan V. Benediktson), one of the 2012 Alberta Literary Awards.
- Shortlisted - The Pat Lowther Prize, also from the League of Canadian Poets.
WALKING WITH WALT WHITMAN THROUGH CALGARY’S EASTSIDE ON A WINTER DAY
Blue-white afternoon. The Bow river churns and smokes
as the city rumbles, economy chokes and bundled homeless
build cardboard homes in the snow. Yes, Walt, this is the new world,
and how often has your huge, burled form lengthened beside me
as we strode through parking lots, the filth and ice of streets? Great seer,
I listen for your relentless cheer and barbaric yawp: Unscrew the locks from the doors!
Unscrew the doors themselves from their jambs! The truth here
is that it is not easy to loaf and invite the soul, when you fear death
from winter winds; when crystal meth is more common than a leaf of grass.
But I am learning from you. Today, when I passed one of the broken-down men,
I barked, By God! You shall not go down! Hang your whole weight upon me.
The man looked at me as when the pain is far away, then suddenly clear.
I kept walking (a small thrill of fear) and summoned your great capacity for wonder
as I headed into the white, blurred fields where sparrows and homeless scatter
like chaff. There I quaffed the sharp chiseled air, the slow, sad light of merciless winter
and said, yes, this world is for my mouth forever…. And I am in love with it. Yes.
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