Search results for ""Author Brent MacLaine""

Brent MacLaine's elegant, capacious, and finely crafted fourth collection, Athena Becomes a Swallow, contains twenty-seven monologues spoken by characters that appear in Homer's The Odyssey. These are not the voices of the major players, but the voices of the minor characters who received scant attention in the original. Here they are allowed to have their say about the events that swirl around them, providing a new persepctive and showing how the shine of the gods also falls on the common folk.

Read more less

Brent MacLaine's poems, like the poet himself, are rooted in the history and landscape of Prince Edward Island. Yet, MacLaine possesses a remarkable ability to graft rural values to contemporary culture, with its urban habits and popular entertainments, its scientific theories and technological mythologies. MacLaine belongs to the first generation of Islanders not farming the land, and his poems explore his uneasy relationship with the patch of earth where he lives. He follows the island contours in an expansive sweep across the fields and into the woods; he also shares an islander's sense of confinement, bound into a small place by the sea and the red cliffs. The island before human existence, the coming of European settlers, or the stubbled ground tilled by his father are as readily available to his fertile imagination as meteorological patterns, modern art, or The Odyssey. Using his Maritime home as template for larger universal concerns, MacLaine offers clear-headed insight into the natural world -- and into human nature -- in an astonishing range of poems shaped by his nimble attention to his quotidian world.

Read more less