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The Address Book: Poems
The Address Book is a collection of beautifully crafted poems of love and loss. They are united by bitter complaint and grief, feelings that are only fought off by music and intelligence. Elegiac, angry, tender, and brazenly heart-felt, the poems achieve their effect through total immersion in the rich palette of human emotions, and a willingness to tap into "This whim / against what drifts to dark." The book's second half includes Heighton's versions of Western poetry's sustaining giants, including Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Sappho, Catullus, Homer, and Rilke.
- GenresPoetry
96 pages, Paperback
First published February 23, 2004
26 people want to read
About the author
Steven Heighton
39 books74 followersSteven Heighton (born August 14, 1961) is a Canadian novelist, short story writer and poet. He is the author of ten books, including two short story collections, three novels, and five poetry collections.[1] His most recent novel, Every Lost Country, was published in 2010.
Heighton was born in Toronto, Ontario, and earned a Bachelor of Arts and Master of Arts degree, at Queens University.[2]
Heighton's most recent books are the novel Every Lost Country (May 2010) [3] and the poetry collection Patient Frame (April 2010).[4]
Heighton is also the author of the novel Afterlands (2006),which appeared in six countries.[5] The book has recently been optioned for film. Steven Heighton's debut novel, The Shadow Boxer (2001), a story about a young poet-boxer and his struggles growing up, also appeared in five countries.[6]
His work has been translated into ten languages and widely anthologised.[7] His books have been nominated for the Governor General’s Award, the Trillium Award, the Journey Prize, a Pushcart Prize, and Britain’s W.H. Smith Award (best book of the year).[8] He has received the Gerald Lampert Award, gold medals for fiction and for poetry in the National Magazine Awards, the Air Canada Award, and the 2002 Petra Kenney Prize. Flight Paths of the Emperor has been listed at Amazon.ca as one of the ten best Canadian short story collections.[9]
Heighton has been the writer-in-residence at McArthur College, Queen's University and The University of Ottawa.[10] He has also participated in several workshops including the Summer Literary Seminars, poetry work shop, in St. Petersburg, Russia (2007), and the Writing with Style, short fiction workshop, in Banff, Alberta (2007).[11]
Heighton currently lives in Kingston, Ontario with his family.[12]
Heighton was born in Toronto, Ontario, and earned a Bachelor of Arts and Master of Arts degree, at Queens University.[2]
Heighton's most recent books are the novel Every Lost Country (May 2010) [3] and the poetry collection Patient Frame (April 2010).[4]
Heighton is also the author of the novel Afterlands (2006),which appeared in six countries.[5] The book has recently been optioned for film. Steven Heighton's debut novel, The Shadow Boxer (2001), a story about a young poet-boxer and his struggles growing up, also appeared in five countries.[6]
His work has been translated into ten languages and widely anthologised.[7] His books have been nominated for the Governor General’s Award, the Trillium Award, the Journey Prize, a Pushcart Prize, and Britain’s W.H. Smith Award (best book of the year).[8] He has received the Gerald Lampert Award, gold medals for fiction and for poetry in the National Magazine Awards, the Air Canada Award, and the 2002 Petra Kenney Prize. Flight Paths of the Emperor has been listed at Amazon.ca as one of the ten best Canadian short story collections.[9]
Heighton has been the writer-in-residence at McArthur College, Queen's University and The University of Ottawa.[10] He has also participated in several workshops including the Summer Literary Seminars, poetry work shop, in St. Petersburg, Russia (2007), and the Writing with Style, short fiction workshop, in Banff, Alberta (2007).[11]
Heighton currently lives in Kingston, Ontario with his family.[12]
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
January 19, 2020
I like my poetry clear and I suppose you would say flighty.
So, maybe that’s the reason for my dislike for this book of poetry. I’m clearly in the minority with this opinion of mine and that’s okay.
-
I found most of the poems hard to understand and equally as difficult to pick apart the meanings of each. Admittedly he did have some gems, but I struggled to find them.
To me it was just a bunch of ramblings and random words he wrote to come off as a profound, deep person. I struggled to find the substance and the emotional pull that I often attribute to poetry.
I just did not like it and I don’t find it necessary to pretend otherwise.
So, maybe that’s the reason for my dislike for this book of poetry. I’m clearly in the minority with this opinion of mine and that’s okay.
-
I found most of the poems hard to understand and equally as difficult to pick apart the meanings of each. Admittedly he did have some gems, but I struggled to find them.
To me it was just a bunch of ramblings and random words he wrote to come off as a profound, deep person. I struggled to find the substance and the emotional pull that I often attribute to poetry.
I just did not like it and I don’t find it necessary to pretend otherwise.
January 20, 2022
His longing, strung on the American night, knew its own slavage.
Debt peon to such lean solitude. Drink with me, please.
Precious friend, you cannibal of elders, your maimed
shoes, lager-lame step, made a hundred-storied ledge
of any sidewalk: hesitation-cut cracks. Forgive me this
going. I always miss you. You thought your uncombed
thoughts and spoke them, penned dense letters so
manically amped and you still must, I guess,
for others somewhere. We two in the post-party
dark as MacGowran does Malone Dies, and the lines
of stereo lights are a landing field below, blinking red
in fog. How your mind then seemed a soaring lamp.
Tell me something important, you said (drunk, dead
drunk again), and I was stumped. Friend, I still am.
* * *
Sometimes time turns perfect rhyme to slant,
as in Wyatt's famous sonnet - how the couplet
no longer chimes, his "ame" turned "am," now coupled
more by pattern, form. So everything gets bent
and tuned by time's tectonic slippage. You and
I, for instance, no longer click or chord
the sharp way we did, when secretly wired
two decades back (no fifty - but then human
prosody shifts faster); and surely that's best -
half-rhymed better suits the human, what counts
over years. But, still, this urge (from the past?
our genes?) to shirk all, for one more perfect-
coupling rhyme: for two again as one pure fact.
* * *
It's said that the dead want us worthy of something.
Why do you wait till the waiting fills years?
Pain shovelled deep has no chance to bloom open.
A grave, a stringless guitar, a lost song.
Enough. They must hate to see us here sleeping.
Why will you stall till the stalling's your life?
it's wake yourself now or never be woken.
Lifetimes you waited for the right phone to ring.
The drowned, it was said, could be heard at night singing.
Why do you never set out while you can?
It's fix yourself now or always be broken.
A grave, a stringless guitar, a last song.
* * *
Each year more of your life lost to shadow.
Small hours, blown open, blare with the soundtrack
o your hindsight, faces framed in the Prado
of memory seem realer than your son's, wisecracks
of an ex-ex-something outstabbing the actual
damage of sprain or wound. So it starts again,
night's neural colloquy, the patient quarrel
exhumed, ex-rival you again cross-examine
and now it's you there in the dock as the court's
night attorney mocks all your explanatory
gab (what you really meant, what you worry
she heard) - you and all sworn desperadoes
of the backward glance: self-held prisoners
in the mind's shrinking cell, battling shadows.
* * *
This is simple as simple comes. He refills
your wine glass before you can argue.
There are no "new wars," only episodes
of that same crude, ancestral fever.
But every love's a new thing - feels it - knotted,
frail collaboration. Fill his glass
with those deeper lees.
The foghorn, rusting of rain on park heroes,
low vespers of a glacial river all
give news enough for now. Refill his
mouth with the warm red wine
of your tongue, this is simple
as simple comes.
* * *
I've had my eye on you, as if in ambush -
a lame, toothless wolf. Out of the fast scrum
it's you I've settled on, your face and flesh
the ones that most appealed. (Not that way.) Come,
let me take your shoulder, guide you - as if led
by the bit and harness - upstairs. This one night
you'll deepen my feeble imprint in the bed
and lie in her arms, your feet between her feet.
She's slender, my love, petite as Helen - still,
I want you to fill her with your seed. This hour
you'll keep her in your clasp (vital as mine was,
once) and . . . the rest you know. Give me a son for
Sparta's ranks. Then go. Please. I hope you will -
give me something for my age. Before death does.
Debt peon to such lean solitude. Drink with me, please.
Precious friend, you cannibal of elders, your maimed
shoes, lager-lame step, made a hundred-storied ledge
of any sidewalk: hesitation-cut cracks. Forgive me this
going. I always miss you. You thought your uncombed
thoughts and spoke them, penned dense letters so
manically amped and you still must, I guess,
for others somewhere. We two in the post-party
dark as MacGowran does Malone Dies, and the lines
of stereo lights are a landing field below, blinking red
in fog. How your mind then seemed a soaring lamp.
Tell me something important, you said (drunk, dead
drunk again), and I was stumped. Friend, I still am.
- The American Night Listens, pg. 6
* * *
Sometimes time turns perfect rhyme to slant,
as in Wyatt's famous sonnet - how the couplet
no longer chimes, his "ame" turned "am," now coupled
more by pattern, form. So everything gets bent
and tuned by time's tectonic slippage. You and
I, for instance, no longer click or chord
the sharp way we did, when secretly wired
two decades back (no fifty - but then human
prosody shifts faster); and surely that's best -
half-rhymed better suits the human, what counts
over years. But, still, this urge (from the past?
our genes?) to shirk all, for one more perfect-
coupling rhyme: for two again as one pure fact.
- Missing Face, pg. 18
* * *
It's said that the dead want us worthy of something.
Why do you wait till the waiting fills years?
Pain shovelled deep has no chance to bloom open.
A grave, a stringless guitar, a lost song.
Enough. They must hate to see us here sleeping.
Why will you stall till the stalling's your life?
it's wake yourself now or never be woken.
Lifetimes you waited for the right phone to ring.
The drowned, it was said, could be heard at night singing.
Why do you never set out while you can?
It's fix yourself now or always be broken.
A grave, a stringless guitar, a last song.
- Gravesong, pg. 40
* * *
Each year more of your life lost to shadow.
Small hours, blown open, blare with the soundtrack
o your hindsight, faces framed in the Prado
of memory seem realer than your son's, wisecracks
of an ex-ex-something outstabbing the actual
damage of sprain or wound. So it starts again,
night's neural colloquy, the patient quarrel
exhumed, ex-rival you again cross-examine
and now it's you there in the dock as the court's
night attorney mocks all your explanatory
gab (what you really meant, what you worry
she heard) - you and all sworn desperadoes
of the backward glance: self-held prisoners
in the mind's shrinking cell, battling shadows.
- The Shadow Boxers, pg. 52
* * *
This is simple as simple comes. He refills
your wine glass before you can argue.
There are no "new wars," only episodes
of that same crude, ancestral fever.
But every love's a new thing - feels it - knotted,
frail collaboration. Fill his glass
with those deeper lees.
The foghorn, rusting of rain on park heroes,
low vespers of a glacial river all
give news enough for now. Refill his
mouth with the warm red wine
of your tongue, this is simple
as simple comes.
- News from Another Room, pg. 58
* * *
I've had my eye on you, as if in ambush -
a lame, toothless wolf. Out of the fast scrum
it's you I've settled on, your face and flesh
the ones that most appealed. (Not that way.) Come,
let me take your shoulder, guide you - as if led
by the bit and harness - upstairs. This one night
you'll deepen my feeble imprint in the bed
and lie in her arms, your feet between her feet.
She's slender, my love, petite as Helen - still,
I want you to fill her with your seed. This hour
you'll keep her in your clasp (vital as mine was,
once) and . . . the rest you know. Give me a son for
Sparta's ranks. Then go. Please. I hope you will -
give me something for my age. Before death does.
- In Sparta, after Ángelos Sikelianós, 1943, pg. 70
May 21, 2024
no one talk to me I'm reading Constellations for the fiftieth time
March 16, 2021
A Governor General Award and Trillium Award winner for multiple publications of poetry in Canada and what a pleasant surprise to see this awesome poet lives in the same town as I - Kingston, Ontario. Very memorable poems here – very vivid, thought provoking writing. If Stephen King were to write poetry I think it would be along the lines of this. His is a bit reminiscent of Al Purdy and mentions this poet in one of his poems but I’d say Heighton writes with more sophistication, where Purdy is raunchy and bold-faced and presumably careless Heighton is more linguistic, sensitive and his poems more delicate.
FROM A HIGH WINDOW
There was no night in that night.
The mood soldiered through the smog.
The rails so near your besides window
you both smelled the cigarettes of engineers
with diesel drafts, steel wheels stammering
the last, brakes-on stage to the port, shaking
the bedframe, swivelling ambulance strobes
across your ceiling.
He tells you that he used to love
being the one who loves less. Believe him,
leave on the lamp. Let tired trainmen wonder
why it burns so late, in a blue window, crepe
curtains alive there like a negligee drying
in the crude breath of engines arriving from the east.
(They haul sunrise behind them out of the Rockies,
A whole dry summer in their cars.)
Don’t let him doze. Lie to him
that this, and he, are the only best, tonight
in your boxcar of a room, floating
high over the sleepers on their bed of stones,
where you both out-sing the trains.
PROMISE LAND
Lonely as a motel mirror, or the crop-dust
winds at dusk, down a highway in the West
on the high plains the day daylight saving dies
and you in the gravel by the car for a piss;
or is it the cold bulb-lustre that’s cast
on a gutted phone booth, nights, beside the ghost-
grocery of some Badlands town; or was your loneliness
more a sound, a scent – hair-smells fading by the day from a
towel, until on the faintest guess?
Still it was good then, wasn’t it, that feeling, each wave
like a hit that hurt you deeper into the world, to lift you off feet
like a line
of early Springsteen, “madman drummers,” and you roaring
along with the black spinning tire of the LP, I believed all
the saxophone
Backstreets Clarence Clemons riffed off would keep belting out
miles beyond Man
with Kerouac on rip-rap rhythm apace, a summons beyond law,
till the heart in hard solitary could only hammer out I believe,
I believe, I believe – and you really did. And I do: nights still, believe.
December 20, 2013
When Heighton hits, it's amazing. The eponymous poem "The Address Book" was just gorgeous, and suggests why Heighton has found success as a poet. Still, at times I felt like he got trapped in his own erudition, and lost sight of his audience. I also could have done without the translation poems at the end of the book.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews