E.D. Blodgett, winner of the Governor General's Award for Poetry, returns to Apostrophes with a music passing through his eyes. His latest collection, open the grass, brings glimpses into eternity, visions of a translucent muse trickling through fingers, and places of silence, and darkness, and epiphany. Blodgett's poetry has the ability to penetrate the mundane with a profound aesthetic sense. His spare, strong words kick up pleasure in the eye and unforeseen recognition. These sixty-six poems open the natural world to embrace human passage.
E.D. Blodgett (1935-2018) published numerous books of poetry as well as diverse criticism and literary translations. He was Distinguished University Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature at the University of Alberta. He won the Governor General's Award twice, for poetry and translation. From 2007 to 2009 he was Edmonton's Poet Laureate.
The poem "Spring" is featured in Legacy's spring 2005 issue.
"I reviewed E.D. Blodgett's An Arc of Koans last year, and have decided that it must speak well of Blodgett's versatility that the poems included in open the grass (both are part of his apostrophes series), are so different in manner. Picture broad, page-wide paragraphs (in a square-format book) threaded with long, sinewy, wistful sentences. The former volume was made up of diminutive riddle poems, evoking impressions more in what they do not say than in what they make explicit. These poems work just as interestingly from the other direction, from the side of prolix extension and operatic accumulation. The thematic furniture is outsize - stars, sky, trees, moon, sea, silence, and of course fields and fields of grass - but they are handled so lightly and dreamily that the poems seem like so many snowglobes with their two or three primary elements falling in a soft flurry of words." Jeffery Donaldson, University of Toronto Quarterly, Vol 75, No.1, Winter 2006
"Where much of contemporary formally innovative poetry unstructures conventional syntax, these poems seek an ancient, traditional, and highly rhetorical syntax in lengthy compound-complex sentences full of twists and turns of focus and desire..Where much of contemporary formally innovative poetry unstructures conventional syntax, these poems seek an ancient, traditional, and highly rhetorical syntax in lengthy compound-complex sentences full of twists and turns of focus and desire." -- Douglas Barbour, Canadian Book Review Annual, 2005.
