Bone Ladder Selected and New Poems

9780887533341

0887533345

Rosemary Sullivan is better known in Canada as a biographer, but her first love is poetry. In 1996 her first book of poetry won the Gerald Lampert Award for the best first book. In 1991 she published yet another book of poetry. But since then she has devoted herself to the biographies of Elizabeth Smart, Gwendolyn MacEwen and most recently that of Margaret Atwood. And for these works was nominated for one Governor General's Award, and won another. After eight years, however, she has returned to poetry. In this new collection, "The Bone Ladder," she introduces a new, experimental sequence, "Granada Notebook." It is written like a novel with an adulterous plot and characters, the sequence is set in the exotic city of the Alhambra. The poems explore what happens when love fractures and how it is recovered only after a long, exhaustive battle within the self. The title of this collection, The Bone Ladder, refers to the mysteries of ancestral inheritance, how the family anticipates us generations before we are born. This book is also a retrospective collection, and contains work from her first two books of poetry. Her books have been published in England, Spain, and Sweden. She is also editor of numerous anthologies of poetry and fiction by women, most recently "The Oxford Book of Stories by Canadian Women" (1999).