Auguries

by Clea Roberts

Whether speaking of erotic love, domestic life, spiritual wilderness, or family entanglements, the poems of Auguries, the much-anticipated second collection from Yukon poet Clea Roberts, are saturated with their northern landscape. Roberts is well versed in the distances and dynamics between tedium and ecstasy, light and dark, isolation and solitude, freeze and thaw, flow and stillness. Her poems are spare and clean, each like a single larch in an immense white plain; their exactness startling and arresting. As the Gerald Lampert Award jury citation for her celebrated first book noted, “Her images . . . are not only crisp and precise, but manage to speak about the physical conditions of this place and its emotional landscape in one and the same lyrical breath . . .”

Written during a period in which Roberts both became a parent and lost a parent, the poems in Auguries lend themselves to prayer, surrender, celebration, reconciliation, meditation, and auspice.

Tell me
how to breathe
between
the painful
and the beautiful,

my lips,
my eyelids
slow with cold. (from “Cold Snap”)

“Clea Roberts writes poems of clear, quiet beauty. They contain the silence of perception: alive to the world with open eye and open heart.” — Anne Michaels

Genres: Poetry

110 pages, Kindle Edition

Published April 1, 2017

Reviews

[Lauren · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is what the years have written on your body:
that you are hard enough to rise up and soft enough to erode.
-Morning Practice

Yukon poet Clea Roberts uses her words sparingly, but each word choice carries significant weight. Nostalgia, grief, friendship, and caretaking are larger themes in this work, with subtle references to environment and setting - usually the snowy landscapes of northern Canada. In a slight departure of theme, Roberts includes a few poems at the end of the collection about her own yoga practice, each poem titled after a yoga pose.

The wind blows clean through the willow.
The heart open, the lungs open.
In the house of the body, a new room much bigger than the last.
- Corpse Pose

[Catherine Black · Rating 5 out of 5]

Astonishingly beautiful: precise, lean, spare, deeply moving. A new favourite.

[Kelsey]

THE RIVER

We crossed
over together,
but only I knew
it was a bridge -- that there was
nothing underneath,
that it would not be there
when I looked back.

Several of these evocative poems will stay with me for a long time, and -- like "The River," I feel sure will take on new personal meanings over time. Also, the second-to-last section of this book will be especially resonant and poignant to those who have lost loved ones.