Henry Moore's Sheep

by Susan Glickman

Aims to extend and deepen the vision developed in the author's successful Complicity and The Power to Move.

Genres: Poetry

88 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1990

About the author

Susan Glickman grew up in Montréal and speaks both English and French. She started out as a dance and drama major at Tufts University in Boston, migrated to Greece for a year of amateur archaeology and professional tanning, and ended up with a double first in English from Oxford University. She finally returned to Canada in 1977, after answering phones and weeding through the slush pile for Sidgwick and Jackson Publishers in London, England, to work for a very small left-wing press in Toronto.
This job somehow inspired her to return to university to write a doctoral dissertation on Shakespeare at the University of Toronto, where she taught English and Canadian literature and creative writing until 1993, first full time on a short term contract, then as a post-doc, then as a Canada Research Fellow. Since then, while raising two children with her husband, glass artist Toan Klein, she has taught creative writing at the University of Toronto, Ryerson University, the Avenue Road School of the Arts, and online with Writers in Electronic Residence, and has been a sought-after guest teacher at numerous institutions including Concordia University, Queen’s University, and Franklin University in Indiana, USA. Glickman also works as a freelance editor, mostly of academic books for McGill-Queen’s University Press.
She is the author of seven volumes of poetry, most recently What We Carry (2019). Her first novel, The Violin Lover (Goose Lane, 2006) won the Canadian Jewish Book Award for fiction and was named one of the year’s best novels by The National Post. Her second, The Tale-Teller (Cormorant, 2012), was a best-seller in Quebec after appearing in French as Les Aventures étranges et surprenantes d'Esther Brandeau, moussaillon (Editions du Boréal: 2013). Her Toronto murder mystery, Safe as Houses, was published in 2015, and her YA novel The Discovery of Flight in 2018.. Her first children’s book, Bernadette and the Lunch Bunch, was named one of the best books of 2008 by the Canadian Children’s Book Centre, and was followed by two others, also highly praised: Bernadette in the Doghouse (2011) and Bernadette to the Rescue (2012); all three were translated into French by Editions du Boréal. Her literary history, The Picturesque & the Sublime: A Poetics of the Canadian Landscape (McGill-Queen's University Press, 1998) won both the Gabrielle Roy Prize for the best work of English Canadian literary criticism and the Raymond Klibansky Prize for the best work in the Humanities.

Reviews

[M.W.P.M. · Rating 3 out of 5]

It seemed I'd been waiting for this forever, when the letters danced together to make sounds, the sounds I heard in my head, or anyone's. When I first realized I was doing it I thought I was cheating, borrowing the "ook" from "book" to make "took" and "look", like copying someone else's tree in my drawing instead of making up my own: central pillar, three branches, a pillowy crown, five apples. Shouldn't each word have its own special, its own personal letters? But there could never be enough letters, enough angles and curves and loopy loops, to make all the words I knew and those I didn't know yet but would. And so I learned the economy of language, to borrow and copy and make do, remaking meaning. Someone else's tree in my drawing, curly smoke from the chimney, two windows, tulips all around. "Look" what I "took" from the "book"!

- Reading, pg. 29

* * *

When you laugh it is all the unsynchronized clocks
in the watchmaker's shop
striking their dissident hours.
It is six blind kittens having the nipples plucked
from their mouths.
It is the ecstatic susurrus of prayer wheels.

When you laugh innumerable
pine trees shed their needles at once on one side
of the forest, indefinably altering the ecosystem.
A thousand miles away
two sharks lose their taste for blood,
mate, start a new species.

When you laugh your mouth
is the Mammoth Cave in Kentucky
and I can curl up there among the bats
intercepting their sonar.
Oh, your mouth is a diver's bell;
it takes me down untold fathoms.

And when you laugh, old dogs limp
to new patches of sunlight
which they bury for later, knowing something
about need.

- Poem About Your Laugh, pg. 51

* * *

I never had it myself which is why
 I love kids so fiercely, seeing in them
the absolute purity of being in the present, absolutely
 in the present, with tomorrow and yesterday
or even later mere words, lying words, words adults use
 to deny you what you want right now - why shouldn't you
want it now? My hunger is real, realer tan God or Africa,
 as every child knows.

Whereas I was watchful and anxious and trying to please
 and therefore not honest, therefore
a child adults liked but of whom other children
 were sometimes, not always, but painfully suspicious.
Once a girl at camp said she hated me and when I asked her why
 replied "Because you're always asking other people
if you can do things for them."
 I didn't understand her then but I do now.

As an adult it used to be important that children liked me
 because it proved that I was a gentle and spiritual 
sort of being at a time in my life when all my ambitions
 seemed dirty; it was not much different from being licked
by stray dogs or tolerated by people's cats
 but I thought it a gift.
It consoled me for other kinds of loneliness, and seemed to purge
 my hungers of whatever might wound me too deeply 
- The Gift, after C.K. Williams, pg. 67