Tom Three Persons
by Yvonne Trainer
Tom Three Persons was created as a one-person oral performance piece by Yvonne Trainer in the early 1990’s. Yvonne’s audiences have variously defined it as a Biography in Verse, a work of Prairie Realism, a Postmodern long poem, a Postcolonial text, and a Multimedia piece. In Yvonne’s own words: “Tom Three Persons stands as symbol for my childhood on the Canadian prairie and the death of that childhood.” Ultimately, on the page, Tom Three Persons reveals the striving to go beyond the self, whatever the situation, toward the advancement of human progress.
$14.95 CAD
Additional information
| Weight | .112 kg |
|---|---|
| Dimensions | 8.5 × 5.5 × .1875 in |
| Page Count | 72 |
| Binding | Soft Cover |
| Year Published | 2002 |
Yvonne Trainer
Yvonne Trainer was born in 1959 and raised south of Manyberries, Alberta as an only child, 32 miles from the nearest neighbour. She has a BASc (English) from the University of Lethbridge, an MA (English/Creative Writing) from the University of New Brunswick and has a PhD from the University of Manitoba. Her PhD studies were primarily focused on Contemporary Canadian and American Poetry with a special area of interest in Canadian Literature and Medicine. Yvonne has published a chapbook and four books of poetry: Tom Three Persons (Frontenac House), Manyberries, Customers (Fiddlehead Books), Everything Happens at Once (Fiddlehead Books), and Landscape Turned Sideways: New and Selected (Goose Lane).
Yvonne Trainer. Damn fine writin’. Yep, that about sums ‘er up.
~Janice Mathie-Heck, filling Station[
In poems, photographs, letters and newspaper clippings, Trainer re-imagines a rodeo rider from the Blood Reserve who became champion at the first Calgary Stampede in 1912. Laconic and reflective, Trainer’s writing seems to rein in a lyricism that bursts through in poems like “The Mind Is The Place.”
~Harry Vandervlist, FFWD
The language is simple; the narrative uncluttered; the lines spare and clean in the way Bert Almon’s or Glen Sorestad’s lines are clean: this is prairie realism as it should be, born of the soil. The poetic is as true to its subject as the short grass prairie is to the soil. There is no straining after effects or self-conscious posturing or rhetoric. If you think it’s easy to do this, try it! I for one am happy Yvonne Trainer is back with a virtuoso performance.
~Richard Stevenson, The Danforth Review
Yvonne Trainer listens with a poet’s love to the sounds around her. She hears voices, finds poems, in Tom Three Persons’ story. She retells Persons’ world, tells her own world, with such tact and such care we are brought into a new hearing. We listen in on the invented real music of her poetry.
~Dennis Cooley
Yvonne Trainer’s deceptively simple documentary poem about Tom Three Persons engages both the history of a time and place and of a man we should know. In her collage of found material, invention, and photographs, Trainer brings this extraordinary man into language where he can tell his story as it needs to be told. As Tom tells us, “names float in air”, and the poet, listening, catches them and their embodiments for her readers.
~Douglas Barbour
Emotional and physical impressions emerge with bone-crunching reality through this unique collection of poems, letters and reminiscences. A lyrical-narrative portraying highs and lows in the life of Tom Three Persons, an unforgettable First Nations cowboy. Yahoo!
~Shirlee Smith Matheson