Search results for ""author claire harris""

Claire Harris is one of Canada's most powerful poets. Dipped in Shadow shows her at her strongest: the book's five poems making hard-hitting statements about women and their children. "O what are you thinking my sisters," the book's foreword, draws women of all races together in the fundamental facts of female life: fear for themselves and fear for their children. In "Night Dances," a frightening story of sexual and physical abuse, knife-sharp language and experimental form expand words far beyond their usual connotations. "Sister (Y)our Manchild" reminds women that the cruellest soldiers in the most vicious wars are their babies; they have nurtured evil in their beautiful children. "This Fierce Body" reviews the life of a young man dying of AIDS as friends watch at his bedside. Experimental form and language make "Woeman Womb Prisoned," a harrowing evocation of a teenager in childbirth, both moving and provocative.

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Fables from the Women's Quarters marked Claire Harris's blazing 1984 entry into the literary world, winning a Commonwealth Prize for poetry in its year of publication. A tribute to the women who create the fabric of life, this book contains poems that have become classics.

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Powerful yet serene, The Conception of Winter is about women, their friendships, loyalties, and pain. But most of all it about physical, mental, and spiritual healing.

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She is a complex novel in poetry and prose poetry, crafted with visual form and eloquent language. Penelope-Marie Lancet, an immigrant from Trinidad who lives in Calgary, yearns for a child to the point of obsession. She sees a child as her salvation. Her fervour results in a false pregnancy and in her denial she forms a belief that the child has been spirited away from her. As she formulates and executes a plan to retrieve her child, her personality fragments to the point of disintegration. Penelope's fixation begins with a tragedy that occurred when she was a little girl: her one-year-old sister lurched out of her arms and plunged to her death. Penelope never forgives herself and searches constantly for the "lost" baby that would make her whole. Hearing of a black baby adopted by a rich white couple, she concludes that this is her "stolen" child, and she steals him back. Little by little, her already fragile self fragments into at least six personalities, all of whom call their outwardly more composed manifestation "She." Each of these personalities is unique, each speaking in their own voice and dialect. Dealing with differing levels of awareness of one another, the diverse personalities seek to find their purpose within the whole as they write letters to Penelope's sister Jasmine, who lives in Trinidad. The more frenzied the letters become, the more they worry Jasmine. By the time Jasmine knocks on the door of Penelope's Calgary apartment, the discord among Penelope's different personalities becomes unbearable and her psyche unravels completely. She is a collage that cuts across conventional boundaries and creates a visual form of poetry and prose. Claire Harris has created a brilliant amalgam of character and creativity.

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Claire Harris has always been a formidable force and now her celebrated book-length poem is available once again in a new edition. In this dream-collage, which cuts across the boundaries of prose and poetry, she combines post-modernist influences with a fully realized narrative. Spanning a few days and several decades, Drawing Down a Daughter follows a woman-dreamer as she prepared to give birth. Speaking to her unborn daughter through journals, letters, stories, and eloquent imaginings, Harris's unnamed narrator calls up a distinctive cast of characters as she travels from the tropical warmth of the West Indies to Canada with its houses "iced in snow." Drawing Down a Daughter was shortlisted for the Governor General's Award in 1992.

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