Best Selling Books by Erin Moure

The poetry in Furious is charged with Erin Moure''s characteristic energy and wit as she explores the limits of pure reason and the language of power. There is, too, a fresh and often celebratory look at love, and, in an unusual finale, The Acts, Moure challenges us to explore a feminist aesthetic: of thinking, of the page, of working life and the possibility of poetry. Furious was the winner of the Governor General''s Award for Poetry in 1988.

In this brilliant collection, Governor General''s Award-winning poet Erin Moure tests the boundaries of tenderness, grace, speech, sexual feeling, and a book''s ability to frame or hold the person. With her typical wit and textual play, Moure breaks the codes of language to reveal the carnality and torsional power of words. Her lines and frames uncover shadow meanings, highlight syllables as marks, and expose the abrasion, erasure, gaps, and cries that infuse a wordliness in all acts, all human bearing.

Erin Moure''s third collection of poetry confirmed her reputation as a major Canadian poet. She writes of the Canadian West, the railroad, the abrasions of love and politics, the miracle of words and ordinary places -- with special emphasis on the hearts, minds, and voices of women.

The Elements is a family book, a thinker’s biography in poetry, and a polylingual homage. Poems about and for Moure’s late father — accepting his dementia as a real way of thinking “world” and “self” in a struggle against invasive powers — are braced alongside poems invoking the struggle of Galician peasants against the invasion of the armies of Napoleon. It is a book about tenderness, and about The Good, in the face of destructions. By celebrating our ability to think and to revolt, it defends the human pull toward happiness and sovereignty, toward life, toward living. “The infinitely transmissible,” it says, “demands this polyvalent body.”

Erin Moure traces a woman''s poetic trajectory through the instability of any search and any procedure. Everything touched upon is called into question as Moure explores the limits of our notions of language, and plays with the power of words to convey meaning or intelligibility, as well as their fallibility.

In Kapusta, Moure performs silence on the page and aloud, writing "gesture" and "voice" to explore the relation between responsibility and place, body, and memory, sorrow and sonority. Here, poetry flourishes as a book "beyond the book," in a space of performance that starts and stops time. In Little Theatres, Ern Moure''s avatar Elisa Sampedrn first spoke about theatre and the need for smallness in order to articulate what is huge. Sampedrn, who reappears in the translation mystery O Resplandor as the translator of a language she does not speak, vanishes later in The Unmemntioable when the split in human identity that results from war and displacement is acknowledged. Now, in Kapusta, the character E. is alone, in the smallest of spaces - the bench behind her grandmother''s woodstove in Alberta. Here, E. struggles to face the largest of historical and imagined spaces - the Holocaust in Western Ukraine, and to understand her mother''s silence at the sadness of her forebears, her "salt-shaker love."

The fifth volume of The Griffin Poetry Prize Anthology includes selections from the books shortlisted for the 2005 Griffin Poetry Prize, chosen by the jurors: UK poet Simon Armitage, Governor General''s Award winner Erin Moure, and Slovenian poet Tomaz Salamun. Royalties from the anthology are donated to UNESCO''s World Poetry Day.