HEART BADLY BURIED BY FIVE SHOVELS by Hugh Thomas

I'm really delighted by the first poetry chapbook that I've edited (and contributed visuals to) for the Supernova Tadpole Editions imprint with Jennifer Hill and Dan Waber's incredibly enthusiastic and lovely Paper Kite Press.

It is heart badly buried by five shovels, by New Brunswick (and Toronto?) writer Hugh Thomas. These poems feature Hugh's quirky incisive humour and lyricism which lives on the sharp edge between meaning and allusiveness. Many of them are homophonic translations from a variety of languages. All of them are in language which seems to have been written by the ocean as programmed by a computer or vice versa. Grammar and sense are a musical code, but it's a quantum harpsichord that's playing, perhaps in two places at once.


MISTAKEN ALBATROSS

The wind navigates the altered sea
straight to the albatross.
The name of the albatross is:
up, down, dance, fall.
Suspended from the sun,
it brushes the salt interface of the eye.
In the organism of sky and water,
the malfunctioning component.
On its great wings aloft,
a liberty which is a theft.
It is a statue of wind.

—Hugh Thomas


4"x4", 24 pages, $8 (includes shipping)
The book can be ordered from here.