What do you think?
Rate this book
Quick
The human body is a world. How it contains all that it does, how it is altered, and how it is transformed after death are the concerns of Quick , a new collection of poetry from one of Canada’s most exciting poets. From the shock of a near-fatal car accident to a meditation on the body as one world within other, larger worlds, the book becomes an anatomy in itself.
- GenresPoetry
120 pages, Paperback
First published April 10, 2007
1 person is currently reading
7 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
February 6, 2015
Another good example of a poetry collection I'm sure I'll appreciate better over a few years, maybe even more, although I did enjoy aspects of it during my current reading. But I lack a certain 'life knowledge' to appreciate this collection as a whole for what it is, and could only point to separate snippets and images that were memorable or fascinating. The poems themselves are very abstract, not much of a concrete approach going on when it comes to addressing the theme and there was much more focus I find on questioning and the narrator's voice above all else. It was enjoyable, but not as much as I thought. This'll join several others on my shelf in wait for my maturation and gain of further life experience.
January 29, 2022
A woman speaks quietly to members of the family. She opens folding doors onto a pebbled beach by the ocean.
Not a king, lying in the boat with the curved prow.
Not a warrior.
Lay your head on his head.
Speak the words. Push the boat tot he edge of water; stand beside it. Let the boat be circled by night, above and below.
* * *
Small as an eye tooth, smallest. Resist the gods. Be tissue-thin,
purple hidden in green. Paper crown, five-pointed. Pretty fool
of May. Shaft of warmth, bright litter on frilled tongue. Enter.
A cupped place to sleep, coddled. Nodding human, come. Rest.
* * *
How to begin -
Anselme, running from the barn, over the barn, over the snow between bare black
apple trees, down to the harbour, where I couldn't see him until
we hauled him out, heavy, wet - he'd been trying to save the priest,
who'd come from Pomquet on horseback. (The steeple of Sainte-
Croix: I see it from the window. Thin, a bone.) Father Benoit didn't
know the currents, how fast they flow under weak ice. How, when
a horse steps forward, shies -
* * *
Toy boats move together,
apart. Closer in, one glossy-headed seal
noses up and down.
It's low tide, and scattered
below the cliff are rocks, razor
clams, broken mussels. The air is a shelf
of blue. Anyone could step over the edge
without falling.
I stroke the points
of a star-shaped aster, lit
at its inmost place. I eat it, petal by petal,
taste the smell, hot heart.
How do we carry a body
on fire? How do we lower it to the grass, tenderly?
I walk to the barn,
where hay is loose across the boards. Darkness,
stranded in the corners. Nothing here,
bu still we're afraid.
If we put out the blaze in one place,
it starts in another. It burns.
Let it.
Past the broken
barn doors, a rectangle of daylight. And further,
the ocean, with its smooth gestures. A distraction of gulls.
One of two
fires along the bones of the wrist.
* * *
An axe, the heavy blade swung -
cracks the sternum. Icy splinters
at the shore. In grey-blue distance,
where the Cumberland slides
into the Chignecto, a darkly smudged
headland floats in cool light. An eyelash,
or a piece of grit, slips through
the hourglass: tipped
moon, pale sun. Glaze of tears,
breath. One cloud ticking past.
* * *
He was sit feel tall, give or take. His body was wrapped in white,
like cheesecloth around Christmas cake, keeping the rum from
leaking away. Only his yellow hand had been unwrapped, and I took
it in mine, weighing its heaviness. His fingernails, which must have
grown after death, needed to be clipped. I didn't let go. I held on
as if we were about to take the floor.
* * *
She's getting used to it. Each morning when she wakes, she sees fire
on the palms of her hands. The flames are small but distracting.
Whatever she touches starts on fire: the chair, the table, even the
mirror. Now she's teaching herself to pick up one thing at a time,
carefully. She knows it's a gift from the gods, bu sometimes she
wishes they'd take it back. Soon, though, she'll be able to put it
inside her ribs and take it out whenever she needs it.
* * *
Water moves around the pulsing mass, lifts, falls. The sea opens,
keeps opening, a world just beyond this one. No need of bodies.
Bodies loosed from houses, hearts loosed from rib cages, liquid all
around, keeping us afloat. We might be all glissando, with gleaming
domes and long, drifting tentacles, scrolled together. One floats
past, another. Then a plastic bottle, half-full. A wave flips the largest
jellyfish, glazes the skin. Here's the work of memory: slippery
remnants lie bloated, distorted. They're discarded, worn-out purses,
turned inside out. The one that just washed up is merely gut
and ribbons, flailing. Hands that try to tell a story -
Not a king, lying in the boat with the curved prow.
Not a warrior.
Lay your head on his head.
Speak the words. Push the boat tot he edge of water; stand beside it. Let the boat be circled by night, above and below.
- First Ceremony, pg. 9
* * *
Small as an eye tooth, smallest. Resist the gods. Be tissue-thin,
purple hidden in green. Paper crown, five-pointed. Pretty fool
of May. Shaft of warmth, bright litter on frilled tongue. Enter.
A cupped place to sleep, coddled. Nodding human, come. Rest.
- Wild Orchid, pg. 19
* * *
How to begin -
Anselme, running from the barn, over the barn, over the snow between bare black
apple trees, down to the harbour, where I couldn't see him until
we hauled him out, heavy, wet - he'd been trying to save the priest,
who'd come from Pomquet on horseback. (The steeple of Sainte-
Croix: I see it from the window. Thin, a bone.) Father Benoit didn't
know the currents, how fast they flow under weak ice. How, when
a horse steps forward, shies -
- Written in Ice, pg. 25
* * *
Toy boats move together,
apart. Closer in, one glossy-headed seal
noses up and down.
It's low tide, and scattered
below the cliff are rocks, razor
clams, broken mussels. The air is a shelf
of blue. Anyone could step over the edge
without falling.
I stroke the points
of a star-shaped aster, lit
at its inmost place. I eat it, petal by petal,
taste the smell, hot heart.
How do we carry a body
on fire? How do we lower it to the grass, tenderly?
I walk to the barn,
where hay is loose across the boards. Darkness,
stranded in the corners. Nothing here,
bu still we're afraid.
If we put out the blaze in one place,
it starts in another. It burns.
Let it.
Past the broken
barn doors, a rectangle of daylight. And further,
the ocean, with its smooth gestures. A distraction of gulls.
One of two
fires along the bones of the wrist.
- Monk's Head, pg. 32-33
* * *
An axe, the heavy blade swung -
cracks the sternum. Icy splinters
at the shore. In grey-blue distance,
where the Cumberland slides
into the Chignecto, a darkly smudged
headland floats in cool light. An eyelash,
or a piece of grit, slips through
the hourglass: tipped
moon, pale sun. Glaze of tears,
breath. One cloud ticking past.
- Hourglass, pg. 48
* * *
He was sit feel tall, give or take. His body was wrapped in white,
like cheesecloth around Christmas cake, keeping the rum from
leaking away. Only his yellow hand had been unwrapped, and I took
it in mine, weighing its heaviness. His fingernails, which must have
grown after death, needed to be clipped. I didn't let go. I held on
as if we were about to take the floor.
- Anatomy Lessons: Hand, pg. 67
* * *
She's getting used to it. Each morning when she wakes, she sees fire
on the palms of her hands. The flames are small but distracting.
Whatever she touches starts on fire: the chair, the table, even the
mirror. Now she's teaching herself to pick up one thing at a time,
carefully. She knows it's a gift from the gods, bu sometimes she
wishes they'd take it back. Soon, though, she'll be able to put it
inside her ribs and take it out whenever she needs it.
- Mornings, pg. 78
* * *
Water moves around the pulsing mass, lifts, falls. The sea opens,
keeps opening, a world just beyond this one. No need of bodies.
Bodies loosed from houses, hearts loosed from rib cages, liquid all
around, keeping us afloat. We might be all glissando, with gleaming
domes and long, drifting tentacles, scrolled together. One floats
past, another. Then a plastic bottle, half-full. A wave flips the largest
jellyfish, glazes the skin. Here's the work of memory: slippery
remnants lie bloated, distorted. They're discarded, worn-out purses,
turned inside out. The one that just washed up is merely gut
and ribbons, flailing. Hands that try to tell a story -
- Ocean, Ocean, pg. 95
June 1, 2019
Gorgeous writing, but man I could not orient myself within most of the poems or this collection as a whole. The early poems, the ones building the atmosphere of catastrophe, emergency, danger, and death, where it seems like the speaker loses both their father and daughter, at least had some, er, palpable or identifiable emotional cue. What’s remarkable about the writing/imagery is how it almost seems like Simpson is an alien writing for humans, as if she can access a nebular boundary of human consciousness characterized not strictly through emotions themselves but also by how the one’s pulse is measured by the breaths of their surrounding environment. The wind sings, and its chorus vibrates deep within the crust of the earth, and at a molecular level—far below the surface, shielded from the skin—there are tectonic shifts, or the collapse of civilization, or this perspective that escapes time and three dimensional limitation to survey the planet and individual and emotional scape of a collective consciousness all at once. Hm. Maybe I should rate higher than a 3 purely for what it inspired in me here. That is the point of poetry after all. Fuck it, 4 stars it is lol.
March 16, 2014
I should have read this before Loop, which caused my expectations to skyrocket, thus leading to a bit of disappointment. The poems in Quick contain fewer concrete images and a lot of abstractions, which made them less intriguing for me. I loved Loop; I thought Quick was okay.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews