Past Tree Appearances
In Print
Barbara Klar
Barbara Klar’s latest collection of poems is Cypress (Brick Books, 2008). Her previous books include The Night You Called Me a Shadow (Coteau Books, 1993) and The Blue Field (Coteau Books, 1999). She is the recipient of many provincial and national awards including the Gerald Lampert Award, the Wallace Stegner Grant for the Arts, and the Joseph Stauffer Prize from the Canada Council for the Arts. She lives and writes in rural west-central Saskatchewan.
Cypress is a series of linked meditative poems focusing on the Cypress Hills of southwestern Saskatchewan, a remarkable landform that Barbara Klar has come to know intimately. Moving with grace between the perceptual moment and its visionary dimension, Klar opens numinous avenues of reconnection to place.
An interview with Barbara by Tracy Hamon is published on Manageable Imaginations at:
http://thamon.wordpress.com/2008/12/26/683/
A brief, highly readable review of Cypress is available in Tree Leaves ’ new section Tree Lines .
From Barbara Klar
from Cypress
Wind is Pine for listen.
Snap means wait.
And the shadow word
dangles from the witch's hair
and fights the old war of deadfall and pours
from the one-toothed gargoyles in the eaves of the forest,
in the gardens of the giants, their woody flowers creaking,
the word leaning west, west, growing vertical
against the wind's disorder, the raven trees planted
by one wingtip and flying.
