The Olive Reading Series presents a special event on THURSDAY March 1st at the EMPRESS ALE HOUSE | Erín Moure launches her newest poetry title, from Anansi Press, The Unmemntioable.
We are honoured to host Erín Moure as she launches The Unmemntioable. This book-length poem delves into the fraught history of war, loss, and emigration from Western Ukraine. The Unmemntioable joins letters that should not be joined. There is, in this word, an act of force. Of devastation. The unmentionable is love, of course. But in Moure’s poems, love is bound to a duty: to comprehend what it was that the immigrants would not speak of. Now they are dead; their children and grandchildren know but an anecdotal pastiche of Ukrainian history. On Saskatoon Mountain in Alberta where they settled, only the chatter of the leaves remains of their presence. What was not spoken is sealed over, unmemntioable. There is no one left to contact in the Old Country. Can the unmemntioable retain its silence, yet be eased into words? Can experience still be spoken?
Erín Moure is one of Canada’s most eminent and respected poets, and a translator of poetry from French, Spanish, Galician, and Portuguese to English. She has read from her work in English, French and Galician in Canada, USA, England, Wales, France, Spain, Portugal, Slovenia, Germany and Japan, and has given seminars in translation, language and construction of identity, and poetics. Of Moure’s work, Melissa Jacques has written:
[her] poetry is fragmented, meta-critical and explicitly deconstructive.
Folding everyday events and ordinary people into complex and often irresolvable philosophical dilemmas,
Mouré challenges the standards of accessibility and common sense
Moure’s most recent works include:
Little theatres – 2005 (winner of the A. M. Klein Prize for Poetry, nominated for a Governor General’s Award, nominated for the Pat Lowther Award, shortlisted for the 2006 Canadian Griffin Poetry Prize)O Cadoiro – 2007
Expeditions of a Chimæra(collaboration with Oana Avasilichioaei) – 2009
O Resplandor – 2010
The Unmemntionable – 2012
The Unmemntioable blog: http://unmemntioable.wordpress.com
Date: 1 March 2012 *THURSDAY*
Time: 6:30pm – 9:00pm
Location: Empress Ale House
Address: 9912 82 Avenue, Edmonton
