Michael Edwards

It’s exciting to discover and read Mary Jo Bang’s new translation of Dante’s Paradiso, Canto I (published in Issue 111 of Image Journal). It seems she’s set on completing the project of translating all three books of the Commedia, having previously published Inferno and Purgatorio. Excerpt: When I saw Beatrice turnAnd look up and to…

Somewhere close to the centre of a Venn diagram, in a blend of minimalism, objectivism, imagism, you’ll find Nelson Ball’s poetry. If you haven’t encounter his work before (or even if you have) to be (re)introduced to his work, you could start with his 2014 chapbook from HA&L Books, A Rattle Of Spring Frogs, which…

Recently, I discovered Seamus Heaney’s translation of three poems by Rainer Maria Rilke. Heaney and Rilke are two poets I enjoy and am deeply influenced by, so this was an exciting event. To hear the dramatic, existential voice of Rilke, translated into the music of Heaney’s English is something special to have found. These poems…

Reading Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities (translated by William Weaver), the fictional city ‘Dorothea,’ with its “aluminum towers,” is a specific image that came into my mind as bearing resemblance or association with a particular style of house, called the Vancouver Special. This design was popular from the 1960’s to 1980’s in Vancouver, especially through the…

“… I learned to write by letting go of the poem. I found that I could begin by sitting in front of a blank page with no preconceived ideas of what should be written there. I discovered that meaning is like so many matrioshka dolls, one inside the other. Unlike the dolls, there is no…

Browsing through online records of the Vancouver Art Gallery’s exhibitions from the past decade or so, I came across this print from Lorraine Gilbert (above). For me, what’s striking about the photo is the contradictory subtleness as well as the vibrancy and darkness of the palette. I feel as though there’s a certain quality, like…

The above photo is an example of the associations and leaps that often occur for me in an average Saturday afternoon research session. It can be interesting to observe what I was wondering about, in retrospect. The search history functions as a surprisingly helpful record to look back to and gather my thoughts as I…

Recently, I listened to David Naimon interviewing Alice Oswald on the podcast, Between the Covers. (Listen here, read the transcript here.) The introductory portion of the episode stood out to me. As Naimon read Oswald’s bio, I was struck by the way she identified as a gardener, alongside the other titles of classicist and poet.…