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Vanishing ACT
When Giles Blunt's first crime novel appeared, the Toronto Star said it "immediately raises the bar of Canadian crime fiction." The Globe and Mail calls him "a master storyteller," and fans of Blunt's fiction are familiar with his ability to shape a tense narrative for maximum impact. With Vanishing Act, his debut collection of verse, Blunt delivers equally potent strength and quality, opening up for the reader a new, "wicked pack of cards" - in that deck, a cast of characters that speak to the different stages of personal journey: coming of age, heartbreak, terrible loss, the fear of death, philosophical musing, and the personal apocalypse that may one day come... But more than anything, this rich sequence of poems is about how our personal identity changes over a lifetime. Blunt's devotion to structure is on full display in this collection, from cinquains to sapphics, from ballad to blank verse. This is not dry intellectualism or a stumbling over spurious epiphanies. Rather, red-blooded passion and emotional dynamics drive us through a panorama of city streets, along open highways, across bridges that connect or sometimes fail, and onward to the beaches and fields and all the spaces in between where we may lose our way - or unexpectedly find ourselves.
- GenresPoetry
ebook
Published April 1, 2016
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About the author
Giles Blunt
17 books410 followersGiles Blunt (born 1952 in Windsor, Ontario) is a Canadian novelist and screenwriter. His first novel, Cold Eye, was a psychological thriller set in the New York art world, which was made into the French movie Les Couleurs du diable (Allain Jessua, 1997).
He is also the author of the John Cardinal novels, set in the small town of Algonquin Bay, in Northern Ontario. Blunt grew up in North Bay, and Algonquin Bay is North Bay very thinly disguised — for example, Blunt retains the names of major streets and the two lakes (Trout Lake and Lake Nipissing) that the town sits between, the physical layout of the two places is the same, and he describes Algonquin Bay as being in the same geographical location as North Bay.
The first Cardinal story, Forty Words for Sorrow, won the British Crime Writers' Silver Dagger, and the second, The Delicate Storm, won the Crime Writers of Canada's Arthur Ellis Award for best novel.
More recently he has written No Such Creature, a "road novel" set in the American southwest, and Breaking Lorca, which is set in a clandestine jail in El Salvador in the 1980s. His novels have been compared to the work of Ian Rankin and Cormac McCarthy.
Series:
* John Cardinal and Lise Delorme Mystery
Awards:
Arthur Ellis Award
◊ Best Novel (2004): The Delicate Storm
Crime Writers' Association Silver Dagger
◊ 2001: Forty Words for Sorrow
He is also the author of the John Cardinal novels, set in the small town of Algonquin Bay, in Northern Ontario. Blunt grew up in North Bay, and Algonquin Bay is North Bay very thinly disguised — for example, Blunt retains the names of major streets and the two lakes (Trout Lake and Lake Nipissing) that the town sits between, the physical layout of the two places is the same, and he describes Algonquin Bay as being in the same geographical location as North Bay.
The first Cardinal story, Forty Words for Sorrow, won the British Crime Writers' Silver Dagger, and the second, The Delicate Storm, won the Crime Writers of Canada's Arthur Ellis Award for best novel.
More recently he has written No Such Creature, a "road novel" set in the American southwest, and Breaking Lorca, which is set in a clandestine jail in El Salvador in the 1980s. His novels have been compared to the work of Ian Rankin and Cormac McCarthy.
Series:
* John Cardinal and Lise Delorme Mystery
Awards:
Arthur Ellis Award
◊ Best Novel (2004): The Delicate Storm
Crime Writers' Association Silver Dagger
◊ 2001: Forty Words for Sorrow
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
January 5, 2017
4. Vanishing Act by Giles Blunt
Blunt is known for his John Cardinal mysteries (which are now a TV series!) and Street Legal and Law and Order tv scripts so finding that he has published a book of poetry was surprising. The poems themselves are little mysteries and I got lost a few times. What I really found inspiring was his use of form, and I am stealing some of his stanza patterns for some of my own poetry as a discipline exercise. Some of the pieces are prose poems that connect the poet’s search for his missing love, Lucy, who has broken his heart. I loved the way he could make looking up her name in the phone book and seeing that it is the old disconnected number so real. When he is driving, you can almost feel the car skidding, smell it. I still like his mysteries better, and I wish he would make the Lucy story into a novel.
Blunt is known for his John Cardinal mysteries (which are now a TV series!) and Street Legal and Law and Order tv scripts so finding that he has published a book of poetry was surprising. The poems themselves are little mysteries and I got lost a few times. What I really found inspiring was his use of form, and I am stealing some of his stanza patterns for some of my own poetry as a discipline exercise. Some of the pieces are prose poems that connect the poet’s search for his missing love, Lucy, who has broken his heart. I loved the way he could make looking up her name in the phone book and seeing that it is the old disconnected number so real. When he is driving, you can almost feel the car skidding, smell it. I still like his mysteries better, and I wish he would make the Lucy story into a novel.
Displaying 1 of 1 review