Slow Curve Out

Slow Curve Out, Maureen Scott Harris's new collection, gathers meditative poems of sensory engagement with both human and nonhuman worlds. The poet strives to see and hear the world clearly, trusting perception and experience before idea. Alert for resonances both among things and between inner and outer worlds, the poems ask us to adjust our sense of what it is to be human, to give up our (false) separation from the rest of the living world, and to recognize and celebrate our embeddedness in the web of relationships that constitutes life on Earth. Walking as well as looking and listening, the poems meander through a world that includes chickadees, crows, ravens, weather, rivers, valleys, dogs, traffic jams, prairie, deaths, births, weddings, mothers, fathers, daughters, languages, bones, dreams and more. Here beauty and pain coexist, and neither experience nor thought is fixed. How, the poems ask, does one keep one's balance? Pay attention is their answer. Enacting a longing to be at home, both in the world and in the self, aware of the permeability of human consciousness, they say be here and notice the other presences--you're not alone. Previous books and chapbooksWeathering: a group poem (a chapbook, with Ruth Roach Pierson, Sue Chenette, Patria Rivera, Julie Roorda). Silver Maple Press, 2008. (Republished online in Poemeleon, May 2010)The Raven and the Writing Desk (a chapbook, with Kelley Aitken). JackPine Press, 2007Drowning Lessons, Pedlar Press, Toronto, ON, 2004The World Speaks (a chapbook) Junction Books, Toronto, ON, 200A Possible Landscape, Brick Books, London, ON., Nov. 1993