Optics
Focusing on intensely personal experiences, Optics shows vision as a trick of light. We see through a glass barrier we’ve placed between ourselves and our world, often filtered by the warps and swirls caught in that glass. We stand behind a window that is growing dark in early winter, not even noticing the creeping darkness across the glass blocking our vision. The poems explore the world reflected back by a simple piece of glass.
Awards/Award Nominations
Short-listed for the City of Calgary W.O. Mitchell Book Prize
Reviews
Optics is a moving, personal account of life as we reflect upon what it means to experience change and confront loss. Stallworthy’s commentary on caregiving for a parent afflicted with Alzheimer’s, and excellent use of metaphor, offers many poignant moments. He expertly captures the sense of drift we feel when confronted with situations beyond our control. Bob Stallworthy’s gift is to transfer his acute observations to the page using metaphors that make a quick and indelible imprint upon the reader’s eye. ~Comments from the Jury for the City of Calgary W.O. Mitchell Book Prize
The effect of Optics is cumulative, even symphonic, with the strongest voice assigned to sight. Reflecting in kaleidoscopic angles Stallworthy’s unassuming, thoughtful poetic vision succeeds particularly in recording, examining and displaying filial affection and disaffection. We are gradually drawn into the gaze of the poems and into the shifting meanings and images that refocus through the book into a satisfying whole. ~Comments from the Jury for the City of Calgary W.O. Mitchell Book Prize
This is Stallworthy’s work at its best, an example of mixing the ordinary with an attempt at something reminiscent of magic realism. ~Jocelyn Grosse, Fast Forward
Optics is an excellent collection, choc-a-bloc full of epiphanies and poignant moments of acute observation, and Mr. Stallworthy has developed a lean, muscular line, tighter narrative focus, and killer sense of closure in these poems. ~Richard Stevenson, Lethbridge Insider
The epigrammatic quality of this poetry loses nothing in its translation from imagination to images fashioned on the page. ~Anne Burke, The Prairie Journal of Canadian Literature
These poems explore the seemingly inexhaustible metaphoric potential of those every-day frames that capture perceptions: storm windows, blinds, rear-view mirrors. Stallworthy’s careful glance often finds that elusive membrane between people where the form of a relationship condenses and becomes visible. ~Harry Vandervlist, Alberta Views
The poems of Optics are about how a man can envy the sun as it escapes the frame of the window it darkens as it goes. They are about keeping your eye on the window until it shows how you look without mercy. This is a book by a saddened lover of the world. It is about Bob Stallworthy as son, stepson, care-giver, forgotten son, yes. And it is the work of Bob Stallworthy the artist polishing his poems a pane at a time until the best shine black as glass. ~Richard Harrison
Samples
Optics
there must be windows that laugh allow yellow sun light to pool on the living room rug the spot where the dog curls eyes squeezed muscles remembering the dream that got away somewhere there must be eyes that allow light to crinkle spill remembered laughter from their corners notice how a window turns black? not all at once the darkness spreads from the middle into the corners until the last time you look it has spread completely out to the edges and when the glass is finally black it is a mirror throwing your face back into the room
