Late in a Slow Time

by Carole Glasser Langille

Late in a Slow Time is an intricate book that deftly marks the 'little monumental changes' that make up our daily lives. In poems about the contradictory nature of wonder, suffering, and acceptance, Carole Glasser Langille shows us 'how fine-tuned this unanswered world is.' In her search for breadth within the limitations of fate, we are privy to a big-hearted poet whose sentiments have been tested and shaped by experience, who acknowledges the good around and ahead of us. This is a wise book.

Genres: Poetry

120 pages, Paperback

First published May 1, 2003

About the author

Carole Glasser Langille is a Canadian poet and teacher.

Originally from New York City, she studied with the poets John Ashberyand Carolyn Forché.

Glasser Langille has taught at The Humber School for Writing Summer Program, Maritime Writer's Workshop, the Community of Writers in Tatamagouche, and at Women's Words the University of Alberta. She has also taught courses called “Creative Writing” at Mount Saint Vincent University, “Writing for the Arts” at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. She currently teaches Creative Writing: Poetry at Dalhousie University.

Several selections from her collection, Late in a Slow Time have been adapted to music by renowned Canadian composer Chan Ka Nin. The production, narrated by Barbara Budd, debuted at the 2006 Sound Symposium in St. John's, Newfoundland and is on Duo Concertante's CD Wild Bird (October 2010).

She has received Canada Council Grants for poetry, non-fiction and fiction as well as Nova Scotia Cultural Arts grants for poetry and fiction. Her work has been nominated for the Governor General's Award and the Atlantic Poetry Prize. Her fourth book of poetry, Church of the Exquisite Panic: The Ophelia Poems, was published in 2012.

Carole Glasser Langille lives in Black Point, Nova Scotia with her family.

Reviews

[M.W.P.M. · Rating 4 out of 5]

that we are all late
in a slow time,
that we grow up many
And the single
is not easily
known.

- Charles Olson
Maximus, to Himself

Already it is too late
to start over. So many people
I'll never be, things I won't do.
Why list them? Soon the years ahead
will be too few to manoeuvre among
and I won't be able to lie, even to myself.
As in a cave at low tide, echoes resound,
not in the spaciousness of possibility,
but in limitation. And isn't this good?
To say, Yes, I haven't. That's right,
I never did.

- Too Late, pg. 11

* * *

Happiness slipped in as the doors were closing,
I can hide nothing from it.
Like a train pulling out of a tunnel
and bursting into light,
much that was covered is uncovered.

When the train gets stuck on a bridge
above the shaking water, I look straight down.
It's dangerous to be thirsty.
But when I look only with my eyes
water is a mirror that tells the wrong tale.

Come to me now,
you who know that the dark
is merely gauzy curtain.
Hurry before my face and legs and arms and chest
disappear.

- As the Doors Were Closing, pg. 22

* * *

When a man opens?
Perhaps intimacy is the most chaste
love, nothing coming between two bodies
but tremor, tidewater inching its way
up the damp shore, leaving its wrack and its mark,
its rhythmic notation.

The isthmus that pierced dark water,
the narrows over which we travelled,
led us to shore when it was nearly dusk,
legs soaked in brine.
In the weather system of mood,
in the yielding and subsiding,
love is tidal.

What's heavy-scented and specific
lingers. This need to know
what you taste like. This appetite.
A sweetness. Even light will not be quenched
as it dazzles shifting water, then lowers itself
down and down.

- Damp Shore, pg. 33

* * *

A beautiful but dazed young woman,
lonely, bewildered, wonders -
for the entire movie - where she'll go

for her vacation. That's it. All is slow
conversation, confusion, blunders.
She cried repeatedly, spies omens

around every corner. Hard, not human
how the gods separate us, send us to plunder
oceans for roses, the desert for snow.

- Eric Rohmer's Summer, pg.

* * *

Like a protagonist in a Jean Rhys novel
who lives alone

on one of those night spent drinking,
too tired to cook,

you're waiting - it's been years -
and no one

has moved you into the house on the hill
near the ocean, surrounded by gardens,

that lovely house. We're waiters, all of us,
at L'Hôtel Impatience. Or patrons. The tips are poor.

Wait, Come back, Don't leave, you cry
to some phantom at the counter.

Who taught us this, the hostess wonders,
to miss what was never ours, to miss

what was never missing? She lights a cigarette.
Once we leave she'll close up.

- After Hours, pg. 55

* * *

From the bottom of my heart?
The bottom is where dark
accumulates drip by drip

until its muddy waters rise and slip
into all that is bright. There's no bulwark in the depths where
uneasiness starts.

Better linger on the surface, a little apart than descend to
what's forbidden and uncharted,
a blackness one might be tempted to sip.

- The Bottom of the Heart, pg. 60

* * *

Look at its centre - all reception.
For what is it listening?
This is a package of a word
densely crammed and about to burst.
Can you see the heat rising
in steam off roads?
No, there are no roads on this plain
at the top of the hill.
Perhaps a parish nearby or farm
will shelter you.
Won't it perish, knocking so wildly,
exposed like this?
It's an art to keep beating
day in, day out, along as it is.
Who will talk loud enough
for it to hear?
Who will find you on this hill with no road?

- H-E-A-R-T, pg. 89