Many of the poems in this book come out of me determination to write about the imperiled Pacific Ocean during my tenure as the City of Victorias Poet Laureate. During that time, I was also raising my special needs son and my mom and father-in-law both died. The writing expanded to other creatures on the planet, and the harm we are doing to them, through a collaboration with Robert Batemans paintings and through work with the Royal BC Museum and their National Geographic Photography display. The poem I wrote in response to Robert Batemans Circus Train, Night Hawks contains within it the metaphor of the train as an extinct creature moving along the prairie and I began to feel the train and the idea of circus caries the metaphorical context of what this book, and the poems in it, explore. That is, endangered animals, lost moments, and events as in circuses themselves, unusual or neurodiverse people who are circus performers, all contained within this endangered beast, the train, or the earth. I watched The Greatest Show on Earth as a child and feel The Last Show on Earth and apt title for a book exploring death, disability and the imperiled world.
Yvonne Blomer is the author of a travel memoir Sugar Ride: Cycling from Hanoi to Kuala Lumpur, and three books of poetry, as well as an editor, teacher and mentor in poetry and memoir. She served as the city of Victoria poet laureate from 2015-2018. In 2018 Yvonne was the Artist-in-Residence at the Robert Bateman Centre and created Ravine, Mouse, a Birds Beak, a chapbook of ekphrastic ecological poetry in response to Batemans art. In 2017 Yvonne edited the anthology Refugium: Poems for the Pacific (Caitlin Press) with poets responding to their connection to the Pacific from the west coast of North America, and as far away as Japan and New Zealand. Sweet Water: Poems for the Watersheds is the second in a trilogy of water-based poetry anthologies coming out with Caitlin Press. She lives, works and raises her family on the traditional territories of the WSÁNEĆ (Saanich), Lkwungen (Songhees), Wyomilth (Esquimalt) peoples of the Coast Salish Nation. She gives thanks for the privilege of water.
Read against the backdrop of a global pandemic, the poems in Yvonne Blomers latest collection, The Last Show on Earth, tap into the intimate nature of grief at the same time they speak to the collective nature of sorrow. The most ordinary of imagesa boy standing in a field beneath a luminous moonevokes a sudden inexplicable ache that resonates long after one has put the book down. -- Eve Joseph, award-winning author of Quarrels and In the Slender Margin
Yvonne Blomers is a consummately tactile and embodied lyric, one in constant contact with the skin of children, the soil of the garden, the surfaces of water. Through loss and longing, these poems offer care for family and fellow creatures, moving through the insatiableness of life, of things run away from homeostasis, in recoil, spiral, tottering states of beauty for which there is no normal, only love of all our errancies, all our failures. This book is a prayer offered against this being the last show on eartha prayer for another show, for the gorgeous show of this earth to go on. -- Stephen Collis, author of A History of the Theories of Rain
Rilke famously suggested that were here to say house, bridge, fountain, gate, pitcher, fruit-tree, window. Yvonne Blomers list is more organic: limpet, moose, willow, tortoise, mother, son, swan. The Last Show on Earth teems not only with names, but with beings: our desires and pains, the sounds of our breathing. In the midst of great destruction, Blomers poems remind us how vibrant our vulnerable world still is. -- Rob Taylor, author of Strangers and The News"
