Al Rempel (Canada)

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A new international literary survey is being born, with foreign poets

 
 

Al Rempel gives us a precise look at his country and more generally at the world we share with poems full with humour, compassion, tenderness, and a range of poetic form and diction.

From his first chapbook 4 poets in 2009 to Understories in 2010 reaching his This isn’t the Apocalypse we hoped for in 2013 and Four neat holes in 2016, Al Rempel leads us through our world but also into more private stories that can make the reader meditate on our past and our confused way of living reality.

A new book, Undiscovered Countries, is going to be released in September 2018.

Sandro Pecchiari

 
 
 
 
At the Other End of the Tide
 
the Rockies wear no accessories
shake everything off into the scree
and rubble below: sheets of mica
thin as frost on a window pane
basaltic rocks and German tourists
in their rented RVs, rocks the size of fists
curled over their tectonic past
hikers and mountaineers by the jeep-full
death by avalanche and rock fall
by slipping on rocks, onto ice, into water
accidents waiting to happen, busloads of Japanese
and small VWs, rattling loose guitars and tambourines
plates of shale tattooed on the inside
with trilobites and spiralled bits of shell
routes that disappear, broken legs, bad luck
glacier till, moraines, wandering eskers
unfriendly weather, a flotsam of casualties
plastic wrappers and other debris
thrown away by Americans in their hurry to reach the Alaskan shore
exhaustion, hyperthermia, heat-stroke
stories of grizzlies, of madness
all piling up under the shadows of great slabs of rock
slaked off into the trough
of each metamorphic wave, the glacier melt
pours down to sea level in three different directions
the mountain shrugs off the cold
wants nothing to stay