The Most Charming Creatures

by Gary Barwin

With uncanny wit, inventive beauty, and numinous surprise, The Most Charming Creatures explores the contemporary and its language, considering our wonder, sorrow, bewilderment, anxiety, and tenderness. While these poems energize and connect and “turn the paren- / theses inside out so that / we mean everything,” they are also alive to the alluring complicity of language and its duplicity and deceptions. “This is the way the world ends / Not with a bang but / while we watch.”
A follow-up to the award-winning author’s acclaimed selected poems, this new collection continues Barwin’s examination of the possibilities of the poem: a celebration, a story, an investigation, a riff, a word machine, a parable, a transformation. But what are the “most charming creatures” of the title? In 1862, scientific illustrator Ernst Haeckel termed radiolarians (ancient single-celled organisms with mineral skeletons) “the most charming creatures,” but here Barwin turns the microscope around to consider something just as strange and mysterious: language, our culture, and the self. From microorganisms, onion rings, grief, and Gerard Manley Hopkins to beetles, neoliberalism, sandwiches, Martin Luther, and stand-up comedy, he offers: “it’s a miracle that we’ve survived / it’s a miracle that we’ve survived at all.”

Genres: Poetry

128 pages, Paperback

Published September 20, 2022

About the author

GARY BARWIN is a writer, composer, and multidisciplinary artist and the author of 21 books of poetry, fiction and books for children. His bestselling novel [Book: Yiddish for Pirates] won the 2017 Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour and was a Governor General’s Award and Scotiabank Giller Prize finalist and has recently been longlisted for the Leacock Medal. His latest poetry collection is No TV for Woodpeckers His work has appeared widely in journals, including Poetry (Chicago), The Walrus and the Paris Review blog. A finalist for the National Magazine Awards (Poetry), he is a three-time recipient of Hamilton Poetry Book of the Year, and has also received the Hamilton Arts Award for Literature. He is was Writer-in-Residence at Western University and the London Public Library and is currently Art Forms Writer-in-residence for at-risk youth and will be Writer-in Residence at McMaster University and the Hamilton Public Library in 2017-2018. Barwin lives in Hamilton, Ontario and at garybarwin.com

Reviews

[Tina · Rating 4 out of 5]

THE MOST CHARMING CREATURES by Gary Barwin opens with a meme poem which is so funny! I loved the humour in this book! So fun to see one poem is for a writer I’ve read before (Stuart Ross) and another for a writer on my TBR (A.G. Pasquella). I loved all the different forms used. There’s a limerick, ghazal, haiku and a sonnet just to name four. My fave poems are Sandwich and CanLit Fires. I really enjoyed reading all these poems!

Thank you to ECW Press for my gifted review copy!

[Georgina · Rating 2 out of 5]

There are some vivid and thought provoking lines and images in this collection. Barwin can also write clever little snips of humour (I think). Nature runs throughout and there is a reflection on poetry and poets with many poems titled "After (insert poem title) by (insert poet).

This is a big collection for a single poet and is a combination of previously published pieces which is another contributing (but not the major factor) in why this feels very disjointed. "The Land of Health" was probably the section I enjoyed the most and the pieces here are more prose than poetry and are clever little bites of fun.

However, I found a great deal of this impenetrable. The sort of poetry that if I was to use in a classroom would have my students throwing down their pens in frustration and me perhaps agreeing that - yeah I don't really get the meaning here over lots of poetic words.

Then at the end of the book I read: "Many of these poems were achieved in part by 'translating' a poem by running it many times from one distant related language into another using Google translate and the finally back into English" and that certainly explained things.

Thank you Netgalley for the chance to read this book in exchange for an honest review.

[Catherine Pratt · Rating 4 out of 5]

I liked the book, but it was very weird for me to read. Maybe it's my deafness playing into this but I don't know. There was some humor in the poetry. There were some animals in the poetry but towards the end, I got lost. I did not understand any of it. To me this book is very good in the beginning and middle. End...lost me totally.

I received a free copy of the book and is voluntarily writing a review

[TallieReads · Rating 2 out of 5]

This collection of poems was solid and different. I personally wasn’t able to get into the style too much. I just didn’t feel like I was connection to the poems on the level I want to when reading poetry. I know some people that may enjoy this, though.

[Claire Cobb · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beautiful selection of poems, inspiring and well worded, throughougly enjoyed reading. Will defo be finding more of Gary's books to read.

[Colie Hathaway]

Dnf. Not the poetry style for me.

[Penn Kemp · Rating 5 out of 5]

“This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but
while we watch”

Poems after poets he’s reading, in the style of: marvellous!