Description

Spanning forty years and ten previously published collections, Wherever We Mean to Be is the first substantial selection of Robyn Sarah’s poems in twenty-five years. This new volume showcases the versatility of a poet who moves easily between free verse, traditional forms, and prose poems. Familiar favourites are here, along with lesser-known poems that collectively illuminate and round out a retrospective of the thematic and formal concerns that have characterized Robyn Sarah’s poetry from the start.

Warm, direct, and intimate, accessible even at their most enigmatic, seemingly effortless in their musicality, her poems are a meditation on the passage of time, transience, and mortality. Natural and seasonal cycles are a backdrop to human hopes and longings, to the mystery and grace to be found in ordinary moments, and the pleasures, sorrows, and puzzlements of being human in the world.

PRAISE FOR ROBYN SARAH

“So assured and musical is the hand that shaped them that these poems tend to memorize themselves, as though they had always formed part of our experience.” —Eric Ormsby

“The cool delight of her poetry is to turn those subjects of routine forgetfulness into words that quiver in the heart… Sarah knows the language: its pressure points, its traditions, its crevices. Trained as a musician, she also understands flow and timing, when to sing and when to keep silent.” —Montreal Gazette