Gravity Matters

by Sonja Ruth Greckol

The work of creating a fully habitable life with a past and present preoccupies Sonja Greckol. In Gravity Matters, she traces an from a nineteenth-century European family that immigrated and settled in central Alberta to a digitized wondering held together by Skype and Google rooted in central Toronto. In this, a first collection, Greckol turns obliquely from the matters of largely personal lyrics to historical and international preoccupations that, nevertheless, remain embodied--a pentimento of certainties, sensualities and queries, empiricism and theory in science, moving from daughter to mother and then mother/daughtering once again--in a feminist voice that is urgent, empathic and wry. Her long poem, Emilie Explains Newton to Voltaire, a fractured sonetto magistrale voices a eighteenth-century physicist and noble woman, Emilie du Châtelet, a key figure of the Enlightenment and locates her in mind and body ands well as in her time. This poem was short-listed for the CBC Poetry Prize in 2008.

120 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 2009