Search results for ""Author Brian Chan""

Brian Chan's poetry goes beyond everyday appearance to the inner space where the consciousness "begins to question the power of space it has fictioned". In staring into the abyss over which such fictions are spun, Fabula Rasa challenges all comfortable and solid assumptions. Thus, those poems which affirm the power of love or celebrate those moments 'brimming with light', seem both more powerful and more movingly vulnerable in their act of affirmation. Chan's poetry requires close attention but has a pellucid quality: "Plumbing my darkest heart, I shape the glass/ of plain mind in which you may taste your own".Brian Chan grew up in Guyana. He is an accomplished musician and painter, and now lives in Edmonton, Canada.

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At first a casual reader might think that Brian Chan was a private poet of the inner self, but that is not the case. For him, acts of inward reflection, intimate communication, the gestures and institutions of human solidarity and the affairs of state are all indivisibly connected. He sees people torn between the need to reach out, because to live alone is 'too heavy a reminder of the soul's slightness' and the temptations to corral within safe boundaries, to fall into the tribalism of nostalgia for 'one mother-tongue or the investment of cowards'. For Chan, such tensions bedevil both human societies and such intimate relationships as marriage. Concerning the latter, for instance, he celebrates most movingly what remains after 'every flood and dove of our heart's peaked ark' but also writes of 'the cage that even the most sacred contract could not but spore'. He writes as a Guyanese (this 'mudcrab') living in the prairies of Canada, where the 'wind's scythe slashes in a dark scar through screams of grass', who has left 'one tribe behind', who, in search of a 'free state' has felt the need to escape colonies 'abandoned to a mess/of incestuous whispers and stunned tributes to indifferent ghosts', who has lived closer than most to the rages of an ethnically divided society where he has seen 'the numbness of his drunken brothers bent/on raping one another's sisters'. But Chan retains of vision of people who 'know all their lives are a web/of interlocked spreading circles', and the dream of a 'a kind of home' with its 'promise of binding of all coals/into one flame as strong as each coal's dying'. At the heart of Chan's obliquely political vision is the conviction that 'all is given to be handed on', that miracles can happen if they are 'not erased by a collector's itch to own them to dust'. He stares into an abyss of numb, meaningless emptiness, rages against the cages, but keeps faith with love and pride in his 'brave human comrades' who keep like faith.

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Thief With Leaf won the Guyana Prize for Poetry in 1989."The distinguishing mark of Brian Chan's poems is that they constantly illuminate the moments of everyday living; wherever the poet finds himself, glimpses of actual and remembered scenes come to him in moving detail... Each poem in this selection is life-enhancing. There is no vain pursuit or striving after slogans, catchphrases, sentiment, or any other seductive, transient passions. For the poet, poetry at its best is like a best friend, trustworthy and of lasting value, an art in which to invest an individual's own quest for permanence, an art through which to converse sincerely, explore and transcend experiences, so we find in them a voice which expresses the most permanent qualities of vision. This is a collection of poems essentially of spiritual questing, Zen-like, giving at their best a quiet spiritual aura to the everyday."Jan ShinebourneBrian Chan grew up in Guyana. He is an accomplished musician and painter, and now lives in Edmonton, Canada.

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